Words of Truth

Transcript of an interview I did recently for 'You, Me & Religion'

2010-11-06T17:02:00.003Z

Click here for an interview on spirituality and Buddhism that I did recently for You, Me & Religion

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

2010-09-07T23:06:00.003+01:00

A nice quote on language

2010-08-07T15:51:00.000+01:00

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
-- Aldous Huxley

Consciousness drives the Universe

2010-07-10T22:59:00.000+01:00

This video blew me away, this is everything I have been trying to express through this blog. I highly recommend taking a moment to watch this

To face suffering head on, is to begin the long and difficult journey to becoming whole again

2010-07-08T13:08:00.012+01:00

Working for one of the UK’s largest cancer charities I am, on a regular basis, moved to tears by some of the stories I hear. In the past my partner has criticized me for being overly concerned with suffering and sadness. My defense to this is that I am not overly concerned with it, but rather that I simply refuse to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, just because one understands suffering, it doesn’t mean ones needs to suffer oneself – i.e. if I tell you a sad story, you do not own that sadness, you’ve merely borne witness to it. My contemplation of suffering is my way of helping my soul to evolve from a state of individualistic self-centeredness, to universal compassion. Knowing that life is not always easy and carefree is what drives me to try and make sure I do my part in reducing the suffering of others. So many people live in a state of incredible ignorance about just how much human beings suffer. We are constantly bombarded with images telling us that we need this, or that we should do that, or strive for what many would refer to as ‘success’. But to me success is not a large house and a fast car, success is not a lot of money and high profile friends, success is not material wealth. Indeed many of the people who achieve these things, in my view, are ultimately utter failures as human beings. Success as a human being is compassion. It is feeling your brother and your sisters’ pain as though it were your own. Success as a human being is realizing that reality is an ‘illusion’ and that our only real experience is not what we possess physically, but rather what we cultivate spiritually.
With this in mind I would like to share with you a story of my friend’s recent suffering. I am travelling to India with her this September, and I am so grateful to have her in my life. She has helped me to understand the nature of suffering and how ALL of us as members of the human race have a duty to carry one another through it when our time comes.

Nathalie’s Story.

'You’ve got cancer.'

It was the one time in my life when all stood still. Not in a mystical or spiritual manner. The stillness was pure terror. The words felt like thunder. I sat there dumbstruck, with tears running down my eyes. It was a Monday morning sometime in January last year.
The doctor continued, ‘ it’s cervical cancer, we’re not sure how advanced the cancer is, but it’s advanced.’
‘Is this how I die ?’ I thought. It may sound dramatic but over the previous 3 years I had seen my father, uncle, grandfather and stepfather all die of cancer… Was I going to be the next in the family to keel over from this agonising illness?

I was 39 years old and my boyfriend had called it quits the week before. My life was crumbling before my eyes. Up until that moment, however, I had felt invincible. I had been an ambitious artist who travelled the world constantly for work and exhibitions. I had always been incredibly healthy and approached life with a courageous and free-spirited attitude. I had shown myself again and again that, if I set my mind to it, I could do anything. Life was an extraordinary playground which I took both seriously and lightly. Everything was possible.

However, cancer pulled the rug out from under my feet. Within weeks, I was in treatment, and I was physically and emotionally brought to my knees. I went through hell. For a week I received radiotherapy in form of brachitherapy which meant direct radiation on the tumor found in my cervix. I was alone in a radiation chamber, strapped to a bed, lying on my back for 6 days and received radiation for 30 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day. I couldn’t move as it would have endangered the placement of the radiation apparatus in my vagina.

After the radiation, I experienced chronic fatigue, depression and my body was greatly weakened from the treatment. A month later I had my 4th and final surgery: a radical hysterectomy which meant I lost my uterus and ovaries. Overnight I was a woman in menopause and I was only 39 years old. The chronic fatigue and depression continued. I was a far cry from the independent, free-spirited and loving person I had been a few months before.

When I was strong enough, I travelled to South India to recuperate. I stayed in a guest house in the village where the living saint, Sri Sakthi Amma lives. At only 35 years of age, he has entirely devoted his life to humanitarian service through poverty alleviation, health, education and environmental programmes. There was a modern hospital next to the guest house and it was a place where I knew I could heal in MY OWN time. This was essential. I spent the first months sleeping and crying. I felt physically and emotionally shattered and fractured. I meditated and did yoga to strengthen my body. I began to learn to bake bread, which was the greatest step for me as it was tangible, and got me into being present in the moment. And it was uplifting to see the joy on people's faces when they ate my bread !

The road of recovery was slower than I could have ever imagined. I had thought I’d be back into work within months of treatment. However, my recovery was complex : the trauma of treatment had awoken suppressed traumas of childhood, so I was dealing with a totally foreign psychological landscape. It took me months to find the correct hormonal treatment for my menopause. The chronic fatigue took six months to dissipate. The depression was tricky. I was grief-stricken by my new menopausal body.

It’s now been a year since I ended treatment and I see life in a totally different manner. I know that I am no longer invincible. I am grateful for each day. I am no longer interested in climbing the success ladder that society has put in place. My wish is to bring gentleness and kindness into this world. Why? Because it was the kindness and gentleness of others that REALLY made the difference to each day when I was going through treatment and the recovery period. Money, fame and making a name for myself no longer do it for me. Professionally I am now contributing my talents towards poverty alleviation, so that less people suffer in this world. I had always been interested in this work before, but now I want, what I have left of my life, to be entirely devoted to poverty alleviation.

Each day I thank Mother Nature for keeping me alive so that I can see each new day and so that I can make a difference in someone else’s life, however small. I want each day to count and to be lived with whole-hearted kindness.

Nathalie Latham JUNE 2010.

Click here to read Nathalie Latham's blog
Click here to read about the living saint Amma

Comprehending loss

2010-07-03T11:46:00.004+01:00

The Day My Son Died

The doctor came to tell us that he had died I thought it was just for that day, so I went to bed early and slept well.

But the next morning I heard them talking downstairs; apparently he had still died (even though the doctor wasn’t calling to tell us today).

So it’s gonna be a few days, I figured; we might as well have a funeral. We drove hundreds of miles in dozens of cars finding and losing the way ‘round and ‘round standing ‘round and ‘round, crying, listening, crying listening standing and standing around.

But when it was over he had still died so there was nothing to do but drive home. It took hours and then the refrigerator had broken down. We soon fixed it but he had still died.

And every night after that I slept as long as I could to give him a chance to not have died.

But in the morning they were always downstairs and when I asked if he had still died the answer was always, "Yes."

And so it went into a week and then it went into two weeks. Eventually it went into months.

And it kept going.

It wouldn’t stop.

It kept on having happened.

No matter what I did, it refused to not have happened.

Even if I wrote in my diary about it

Even if I wrote a poem about it

Even if I forgot about it,

IT didn’t forget about it.

Not for a second was it caught off guard.

It was as stubborn as the music of the spheres.

It just wouldn’t let bygones be bygones.

To this day it has happened.

It insists on having happened.

It will never tire of having happened.

Nothing will distract it from having happened.

It was more than one day. It was more than one week.

It was more than months. It was more than years.

And it knew it – ALL the time

-- Marion Cohen

A few thoughts I had tonight as I was drfiting off to sleep...

2010-06-25T00:25:00.002+01:00

Malevolent thoughts that bring us pain and suffering are no more than the sum of our ego in fear of its inevitable annihilation. An ego, which in all its attempts to rationalise, justify and deny what it knows will one day come to pass, pleads incessantly for redemption with that from which it sprung. Why do they exist – these, our darkest thoughts, dredged up from within us like sand churned up in a mounting wave. In thought, our mind is like a vast ocean tossing and throwing us with the ebb and flow of creation. Whereas in silence and stillness our mind is like a brightly polished mirror, capable of reflecting the infinite velvet expanse of the night sky above. A sky that has borne witness to each and every event played out in humanity, a sky whose tales would expound a wisdom as old as the ages.

But the sky, nothingness, does not speak. She is a silent sky who weeps silent tears as she watches the folly of man played out before her again and again.

"Your ignorance betrays you, for you have forgotten why you are here, and moreover, that you have been here many times before. You look outwardly with blind eyes in search of something that will make you whole again."

How cruel the universe is placing the very answer to all of our questions in a place so close behind our eyes, that most of us will never see it.

To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one

2010-06-07T14:08:00.001+01:00

"The extent of the ego's inability to recognize itself and see what it is doing is staggering and unbelievable. [...] To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions - as they happen. This is not really a 'doing' but an alert 'seeing'. In that sense, it is true that there is nothing you can do to become free of the ego. When that shift happens, which is the shift from thinking to awareness, an intelligence far greater than the ego's cleverness begins to operate in your life. Emotions and even thoughts become depersonalized through awareness. Their impersonal nature is recognized. There is no longer a self in them. They are just human emotions, human thoughts. Your entire personal history, which is ultimately no more than a story, a bundle of thoughts and emotions, becomes of secondary importance and no longer occupies the forefront of your consciousness. It no longer forms the basis for your sense of identity. You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions"
-- Eckhart Tolle

Kundalini yoga awakening the chakras

2010-05-31T14:33:00.002+01:00

"Kundalini is a psycho-spiritual energy, the energy of the consciousness, which is thought to reside within the sleeping body, and is aroused either through spiritual discipline or spontaneously to bring new states of consciousness, including mystical illumination. Kundalini is Sanskrit for "snake" or "serpent power," so-called because it is believed to lie like a serpent in the root chakra at the base of the spine. In Tantra Yoga kundalini is an aspect of Shakti, the divine female energy and consort of Shiva." See the following Full article

When I meditate, I see an eye

2010-05-31T11:24:00.002+01:00

From very early on in my meditation practice I have noticed that one of the common visualisations that appears when I close my eyes is a single eye. It's not particulary scary but I do feel like it's gazing back at me from the divine realm. It's quite useful for the purpose of samatha meditation as I use it as a one-pointed focus object and continuously draw my attention back to it. Last night the eye appeared as I was drifting off to sleep more vividly than ever. It was right there in my field of vision. I was quite surprised when I googled it this morning that I found I was not alone, and that one person had actually created a picture of what they see.

Click here to read a forum thread on it

Perhaps it's symbolic of my NDE having opened up my third eye chakra? It would be interesting to hear from anybody else who has experienced a similar visual when meditating.

Just close your eyes, surrender and allow the universe to take you where it wants to.

2010-05-21T00:39:00.006+01:00

For years now I have been thinking about my near death experience and the way it’s changed me. Tonight I managed to find yet another article on the internet from a doctor in Russia who had been using ketamine to treat alcoholics and had eventually self-administered the drug to himself. When I read him describe in his own words what happened to him (click here to read his account) I began to shake…again and again I find that if I look for long enough, I eventually stumble across other peoples experiences and read words that describe down to the most intricate detail and sentiment exactly what happened to me. How can so many people from such a range of different cultures, backgrounds and religions experience exactly the same thing? We even use the exact same words to describe the spiritual emergence, phrases like piercing through 'the fabric of reality' and seeing our lives 'played out as games'. How can a spiritually devoid and scientifically minded rationalist be so swiftly and irreversibly transformed to an intensely spiritual being practically overnight?

When I read words that encapsulate my experience so completely written by others, I want to know and understand what happened to me to the point that my whole body starts to tingle, as though every cell that comprises my being is yearning to reconnect with the infinite, as though every cell in my body is trying to show me the one thing I have forgotten… the one thing all of us have forgotten – what we truly are. Tonight I got down on my hands and knees and in Buddhist sentiments told the universe that I surrendered, that this had gone on long enough, that I wanted to again experience what had happened to me that night in some small way again. My desire to know what I am consumes me to such a degree sometimes that I can think of nothing else for hours.

So I surrendered to that which created me, my body tingling, I prostrated three times as I normally would before meditating and holding my jade buddhist necklace in my hand I closed my eyes, lit a candle and allowed the universe to take me where it wanted to. This was real surrender, completely devoid of ulterior motive or preconceived ideas of what I thought I should see or feel. I just gave in. And that’s when I finally got somewhere with my meditation. My thoughts just stopped and it was as though my consciousness rose through the crown of my head and connected with the infinite. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I just sat there and felt myself subsumed by my creator, every cell in my body was on fire, I was no longer in my body I had emerged into whatever is beyond it. The experience was so utterly intense and exciting I was unable to remain in that wonderful infinite nothingness for long - five minutes at most. But I knew that the universe was listening to me. That it always had been. And now I know that all I have to do is close my eyes and allow it to take me where it wants to. To surrender.

London, May 2010

'The World As I See It' - An Essay by Albert Einstein

2010-05-16T16:50:00.001+01:00

Great spirits have always encountered violent oppostion from mediocre minds

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.
"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Big Bang, Big Crunch and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

2010-04-27T18:25:00.001+01:00

Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return:

"What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, `This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, `You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!'"

Tibetan Endless Knot

If time really is cyclical, and if we are all bound to experience our lifetimes over and over again for eternity, then it would make sense that the universe was bound for the same fate – that eventually the Big Bang would repeat itself. The Big Crunch is one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately ending as a black hole singularity. Perhaps we could consider the universe as a flower slowly blooming over billions and billions of years - our galaxy but a microscopic speck of pollen within that flower. At this point in time in what we would label 2010 perhaps that flower is just a bud its petals just on the edge of breaking apart for the first time. But there will inevitably come a time when that flower is in full bloom, where those petals will have stretched to their farthest expanse, and when that flower will slowly begin to wither and die. Eventually those petals - all the stars, planets and galaxies of the universe will begin to fade, to lose their vibrancy, and to deteroriate into the nothingness from which they sprang. The universe will collapse in onto itself until eventually one day, billions and billions of years into the future, everything that ever was will be compressed into the tiniest spark. But just as great forests grow from the tiniest of seeds, so to will the universe once again spring into life from the one tiny spark.

2010-04-26T15:45:00.002+01:00

Sometimes I believe the world was created to shelter human beings from experiencing the unadulterated horror of what their own true nature really is.

2010-04-26T12:12:00.002+01:00

'The Scream' - Edvard Munch

"I was walking along a path with two friends — the sun was setting — suddenly the sky turned blood red — I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence — there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city — my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

The ego is a limited belief system within our minds that we have molded and identified as being who we are. The ego survives by establishing boundaries, borders and limits on everything it sees. The defining of such boundaries, borders and limits gives it the illusion that it can tell us what is right and wrong, all in an effort to control us by instructing us on what we are and are not, how we should act and not act, and why we should judge those who challenge it; the status quo. We are taught the right and wrong way to do things, and the right and wrong way to react. Because we learn from the outside world, we believe that truth lies outside of ourselves.

Judgment and fear feed the ego, generating numerous perceived weaknesses and limitations we believe we must defend as real. The more time we spend in defense of our egos and our limitations, the more we believe that this is who we are. And because we see our egos as real and representing ourselves, we defend our egos against anyone we perceive to be as attacking them. In our minds, any view that disagrees with our belief systems attacks them.

We perceive the attacks on our egos and their illusions as real, so we become defensive. The more time we spend defending our false or ego-selves, the more we reaffirm the ego’s reality. The more we reaffirm the ego’s reality, the more willing we are to come to its defense. The more we defend the illusions of the ego-self as real, the more concepts and ideas we will encounter in the world that do not fit into our reality. We perceive different concepts and ideas as assaults to our reality. We defend our ego-selves, through the act of judgment. The exercise of judgment separates us from our fellow brothers and sisters causing stress that may be conscious or unconscious. Stress creates confusion, and a build up of confusion ultimately leads to chaos.

The more time we spend in defense of our ego-selves, the more time we exist in a state of confusion. We might give our state of confusion a hundred different names, such as annoyance, anger, stress, sadness, depression, but they all exist because of our belief in the ego's reality. They all exist within our minds and are fed and kept alive by our belief in our ego-selves.

Our tolerance for pain may be high but our acceptance of our ego-selves is not without limit. Many of us come to a point in our lives where we tell ourselves that there must be a better way, a more fulfilling way of living - that this just can't be what it's all about! These thoughts begin the process of awakening ourselves to the knowledge of who we truly are.

From 'You have chosen to remember' by James Blanchard Cisneros
http://www.chosentoremember.com/

The universe may provide the spark, but we each keep our own fire burning.

2010-04-25T17:26:00.000+01:00

"Looking to god to bring order to a society makes about as much sense as throwing a virgin into a volcano to keep it from erupting."

Pele - The mythical Hawaiian goddess of fire, dance, violence and volcanoes.

Ketamine and Quantum Psychiatry - Dr Karl Jansen

2010-04-25T13:13:00.001+01:00

An interesting article by one of the world's leading experts on Ketamine

The word 'psychedelic' was invented by an English psychiatrist (Humphrey Osmond) and means 'mind-revealing'. A psychedelic drug may tell us more about how the mind constructs reality, personality and a sense of meaning and sacredness. It is sometimes said that ketamine is not a psychedelic drug because it has anaesthetic properties not seen with LSD, DMT, psilocybin and mescaline. Nevertheless, it can access all of the realms of consciousness mapped out by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof on the basis of LSD research. Ketamine is mentioned in (for example) Psychedelics Encyclopedia, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered and The Essential Psychedelic Guide.

Ketamine is relatively safe when used in hospitals. There is a wide margin between the top end of the medical range and a lethal dose. Psychedelic doses are usually only 10-25% of surgical doses, given by the same route for the same person. At these levels, it behaves more like a stimulant than a sedative and does not usually suppress the breathing or heart rate, although exceptions do occur. The higher brain is switched on rather than shut down. This state is different from being unconscious, where the light-bulb is turned off and if the person goes too far they may stop breathing. There are cases of accidental injections with 10 times the amount required for surgery, with no obvious, lasting ill-effects. When ketamine is taken outside a medical setting, the main dangers arise from the physical incapacity it produces.

Dose, how the drug is taken, set and setting have an influence on the experience. 'Set' refers to the personality, past experiences, mood, motivations, intelligence, imagination, attitudes, what is going on in his or her life and the expectations of the person. Expectations are affected by what people hear and read about the drug. 'Setting' refers to the conditions of use, including the physical, social and emotional environment and the other people present. Empathy with the person giving the drug is a very important factor, even with an anaesthetic.

Near-Death and Near-Birth Experiences

A 'near-death experience' (NDE) is a report of leaving the physical body, and sometimes going through a tunnel towards 'the light'. Ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the NDE, including the conviction of being dead, having a telepathic communion with God, seeing visions, out-of-body trips, mystical states, entering other realities, re-experiencing old memories, and a life review which may have therapeutic value Most NDE's occur in people who are not physically near death.

An NDE can be therapeutic. After-effects can include an enhanced joy in living, reduced fear of death, increased concern for others, reduced levels of anxiety and neurosis, reduced addiction, improved health and a resolution of various symptoms. Positive changes can also follow ketamine -induced NDE's (K-trips) which occur within a therapeutic alliance, in an appropriate set and setting. This is called death-rebirth psychotherapy.

Where do these experiences originate? I have written at some length about the physical basis for them in the past. In this article I will consider more speculative suggestions that the brain can act as a transceiver, converting energy fields beyond the brain into features of the mind, as a television converts waves in the air into sound and vision. Advances in quantum physics suggest that certain drugs, and the conditions which produce NDE's, may 'retune' the brain to provide access to certain fields and 'broadcasts' which are usually inaccessible. This retuning is said to open doors to realms which are always there, rather than actually producing those realms, just as the broadcast of one channel continues when we change channels.

The Quantum Mind

Some people believe that ketamine is a mental modem which can potentially connect the mind to 'everything else', allowing a peek behind the curtain at the inner workings of this and other realities. In the old Newtonian universe, the mechanical view declared that all possible forms of energy and fields had already been discovered; that the ordinary, everyday perception of space, time and matter and energy was the only scientifically correct reality; that all people were separate from each other and the rest of the universe; and that consciousness could not exist without a living brain.

Some of these declarations can be reassessed in the light of new discoveries in physics. A subatomic particle can be in many different places at once. When a photon changes in one place and time, it's 'linked photon' changes simultaneously, even if it is on the other side of the universe. It's as if there was no space between them at all. This means that some physical boundaries could be arbitrary. A messy explanation for this is tachyon theory, faster-than-light particles which carry messages between the photons. Bell's theorem is more attractive. This involves a hyperspace where all realities exist at a single point, so no messages are required.

If entry can be gained to the quantum realm, awareness (the 'disembodied eye') might travel through different realities without the body itself going anywhere.

It was like a cosmic assembly line that was constantly churning out the alternate universes that some physicists theorise about in which every conceivable possibility becomes an actual reality. I even had brief flashes in which I experienced some of these alternate realities as they sprouted forth out of this cosmic womb...quick glimpses into what felt like other incarnations, other lives I could have led, darting journeys through seas of pure information.
(Trey Turner, 100mg ketamine i.m.)

A person is not a photon, and it is a real quantum leap to go from the subatomic world to human events. Nevertheless, to improve our understanding of psychedelic experience we may need to reconsider some of the material which has been dismissed as hallucinations, psychosis, suggestibility, stupidity and fraud. Hallucination is only another descriptive term - it doesn't really explain anything. 'Quantum' based explanations for certain mental states have started to appear, and we should be wary of dismissing these new theories out of hand. Some of the most significant advances were opposed by the most renowned scientists of the day. Einstein himself opposed quantum physics, declaring that God did not play at dice. Einstein described this physics as 'absurd, bizarre, mind-boggling, incredible, beyond belief...' and 'the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought'. However, Einstein was wrong. The 'system of delusions' worked very well, and its 'psychotic' advocates won many Nobel prizes. Subatomic particles could indeed behave as if time and space were non-existent.

It was next observed that there are similarities between quantum processes and human thought processes. Leading physicists suggested that consciousness may involve quantum events, with profound implications for understanding certain altered states of being. Professor Stephen Hawking, who sits in Newton's former chair at Cambridge, believes that the universe has no boundaries in space or time, and is made up of super-strings which vibrate in 'extra dimensions', balancing vibrations in the usual dimensions: positive and negative energies cancelling each other to produce the our universe, based on a 'new' kind of symmetry called 'super symmetry'. The latest atom smasher may provide evidence of this super symmetry, producing the world's most expensive Yin-Yang symbol. Has the division between physicists and psychedelic mystics become one of whether instruments or the mind itself is used to make the same observations about 'the ground of being'? The language of LSD trips can resemble the language of the older quantum physics, involving white light and dancing particles, but new reports in physics journals use terms which are much closer to 'the language of ketamine'. Super-string theory is being supplanted by the discovery of whole groups of extended objects called p-branes . These may be viewed as types of membranes, with a string being a one-brane as its only dimension is length. There are other types of 'branes' with far more dimensions. Becoming an across-the-universe membrane is a typical ketamine effect. Before p-brane theory was widely known, ketamine and isolation tank explorer John Lilly MD wrote:

At the highest level of satori from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. This used to be called fusion with the Universal Mind or God. In more modern terms you have done a mathematical transformation in which your centre of consciousness has ceased to be a travelling point and has become a surface or solid of consciousness...It was in this state that I experienced 'myself' as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A 'membrain'.

Thus transpersonal events may be possible within the new physics, if subatomic events are involved in consciousness. Ketamine may be a drug which 're-tunes' the brain to allow awareness to enter the quantum sea. If this is indeed the case, then we may have to regard some of the reports of eternity, infinity, multiple universes and linkage with other beings as phenomena demanding a more sophisticated explanation than a brief dismissal as 'hallucinations and mental illness' requiring no further consideration.

Ketamine Psychedelic Therapy (KPT)

Over the past 15 years, ketamine has been given to over 1,000 patients in St. Petersburg as an aid to psychotherapy, mainly to assist in the treatment of alcoholism in well-planned trials with proper clinical control groups. The scientific rigour of these studies is impressive. Long-term follow-up of patients has been very encouraging, and the treatment has been extended to heroin addicts and some forms of neurosis. Not a single patient has had complications such as prolonged psychosis, flashbacks or non-prescribed use of ketamine. This work has been carried out by psychiatrist Dr. Evgeny Krupitsky and his team. Evgeny is Chief of the Laboratory, and was recently awarded an honorary Doctor of Science. He spent a year with the ketamine research team at Yale, sponsored by the conservative National Institute of Drug Abuse.

Sessions are supervised by two physicians, a psychotherapist and an anesthetist. A return to normal usually began after 45 minutes to an hour, with a recovery period of 1- 2 hours.

In addition to very good rates of sobriety at one and two year follow-up compared to the control group, on tests of personality change there are significant improvements in many scales including depression, anxiety and ego strength. People become more confident about their own ability to control their lives and to accept responsibility. Non-verbal emotional attitudes are brought to the surface and made known, resulting in less conflict between verbal /conscious and non-verbal/unconscious attitudes involving alcohol, the personality and other people.

There was also a shift in values towards creativity, self improvement, spiritual contentment, social recognition, achievement of life goals, independence, and improvement of family and social life. Life became more meaningful, and the ability to live according to that meaning increased. KPT can reconnect the ego with denied parts of the self. It can also lead to a perception of reconnection with 'wider fields' such as the family, community, planet and universe in general - a form of spiritual experience. Changes in spirituality were assessed using scales designed to measure spiritual change in the Alcoholics Anonymous approach, and the Life Changes Inventory developed to assess the outcome of NDE's.

We try to assist in the patient's psychological integration of the spiritual transformation which can result from the psychedelic experience. The uniquely profound and powerful experience often helps them to generate new insights that enable them to integrate new, often unexpected meanings, values and attitudes about the self and the world. (Krupitsky and Grinenko, 1997)

'I saw the Light' conversions have long been linked with spontaneous recovery from addiction and criminality. All of the 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, have a spiritual orientation and require acceptance of the guidance of a 'higher power'. This may be seen as part of the psyche or a separate entity, depending on personal belief.

Death-Rebirth Psychotherapy

An NDE can be a pivotal turning point, encouraging significant and positive life changes. People who attempt suicide have a subsequent risk of making further attempts which is at least 50 -100 times greater than the normal population. In contrast, suicide attempts which result in NDE's are followed by a reduced risk of further attempts, despite an increased belief in an after-life. Of those who survived a jump from the Golden Gate bridge and had an NDE, none went on to completed suicide, and all were united in their support for a barrier to prevent further attempts. These findings suggested that the artificial induction of NDE's by relatively safe means, within a therapeutic alliance in an appropriate set and setting, might have positive benefits in some people.

The Back Pages

Throughout human history, altered states of being have played a part in healing. The roles of priest and doctor came together in one person (e.g. shaman, 'witch-doctor' etc.) who entered 'mental realms', perhaps aided by psychoactive plants, to speak with spirits for the good of the people. Sometimes, they took the ill person into these realms with them.

The belief that inducing such states for therapeutic purposes was a mis-guided idea of the 1960's, now abandoned due to lack of efficacy and unacceptable risks, is incorrect. This was not a minor curiosity of the lunatic fringe. From 1950 to 1970, more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications appeared on the clinical use of LSD, in over 40,000 patients. The aims included strengthening the therapeutic alliance, diagnosis, gaining access to memories, and improving insight and the relief of symptoms. Conditions treated included anti-social behaviour, alcoholism, obsessional neurosis, and the psychological problems of the dying. Many of the professionals involved were not at all radical, or even liberal, in outlook. This large enterprise came to a sudden halt when LSD was placed in class A/schedule 1.

New treatments have frequently been greeted with widespread and inappropriate use, and extravagant claims. They then sink to their proper place in the medical cupboard. In some cases, this can be affected by political, social and ideological factors. The only psychedelic drug which can be used in medicine is ketamine, where it may be used to prevent pain in the body but is not licensed for the treatment of pain in the mind.

In the normal course of events, treatment involving psychedelic drugs would have eventually found its proper place, after the extravagant claims phase had passed, with the usual list of possible adverse effects, indications and contra-indications, cautions and precautions, advocates and opponents -as exist for all forms of treatment. Psychedelic drugs, however, became caught up in an intense ideological battle. The result was that not only did all therapeutic use come to an abrupt halt after 20 years, but almost all research projects were also suppressed. This did not happen because a serious new side-effect emerged, or because there was absolutely no evidence of efficacy. The complete ban on psychedelic drug research appears to have arisen from issues which are largely ideological. Ketamine provides an example of the processes involved. It has been given to millions of patients, and there are numerous reviews affirming its safety (when used in a controlled medical context) and value. In most countries it is not even a controlled drug. Nevertheless, if a research proposal is made involving 10% of the normal anaesthetic dose, to be given to healthy informed volunteers, and the word 'psychedelic' appears anywhere in the proposal, there is immediate and grave concern amongst ethical committees where anaesthetic trials may proceed with relative ease. It is difficult to explain this anomaly using scientific and health concerns. These anomalies have led to suggestions that this era has a taboo against having certain aspects of the mind revealed. Ketamine may provide an example of this taboo: a relatively safe medicine which is suddenly seen as unsafe because it is described as a psychedelic drug rather than a dissociative anesthetic. Nevertheless, research with this substance is proceeding in several countries and may eventually lead to the development of a 'quantum psychiatry', just as Freudian psychiatry , which saw psychic energy as a head of steam in the mind, took its cue from Newton's mechanical outlook 100 years earlier.

To those who would do away with suffering...

2010-04-04T18:31:00.002+01:00

I'm always surprised when I find myself in a situation where I am overcome by a great sadness of suffering. For no matter how much I know deep down that the state is only temporary, it does little to negate the intensity of my feelings. Even when I know that the suffering will in all liklihood lead me to a better place and/or teach me a valuable lesson.

Life is a contant struggle to overcome the mind's oversimplification of situations and of suffering in general. Learning not to see adversity as "the end of the world" is a very difficult lesson to grasp. Breaking up with a partner, losing that job, not getting one's own way. If only we could always see these situations with the benefit of hindsight - but she is a cruel teacher, giving the answer first and the lesson afterwards. The Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo recognised the imperative of suffering at the turn of last century when he penned his erudite two volume 'Life Divine'.

"The true foundation of the theory of rebirth is the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence out of the veil of Matter and its gradual self-finding. Buddhism contained this truth involved in its theory of karma and emergence out of karma but failed to bring it to light; Hinduism knew it of old, but afterwards missed the right balance of its expression. Now we are again able to restate the ancient truth in a new language and this is already being done by certain schools of thought, though still the old incrustations tend to tack themselves on to the deeper wisdom… The theory of rebirth is an intellectual necessity… But what is the aim of that evolution?… The continual growth towards a divine knowledge, strength, love and purity… What of suffering and happiness, misfortune and prosperity? These are experiences of the soul in its training, helps, props, means, disciplines, tests, ordeals – and prosperity is often a worse ordeal than suffering. Indeed, adversity, suffering may often be regarded rather as a reward to virtue than as a punishment for sin, since it turns out to be the greatest help and purifier of the soul struggling to unfold itself. To regard it merely as the stern award of a Judge, the anger of an irritated Ruler or even the mechanical recoil of result of evil upon cause of evil is to take the most superficial view possible of God’s dealings with the soul and the law of the world’s evolution."

-- Quoted from Ian Lawston's seminal work The Big Book of the Soul

You are not who you think you are

2010-03-28T22:19:00.002+01:00

To truly know oneself, is to know the terrifying beauty of the universe.

2010-03-28T20:29:00.000+01:00

“A miracle is nothing more or less than this. Anyone who has come into a knowledge of his true identity, of his oneness with the all-pervading wisdom and power, this makes it possible for laws higher than the ordinary mind knows of to be revealed to him.” Ralph Waldo Trine

http://themeeningoflife.blogspot.com/

Einstein's Dreams...Is life just a time loop?

2010-03-28T19:14:00.001+01:00

I was writing an email to a friend when I remembered an excerpt I'd read in Alan Lightman's book "Einsteins's Dreams". In the book Lightman writes a series of different essays about what he thinks the nature of time might be. I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with this hypothesis, but I remember when I read it, that it had a profound effect on me. It remeber having the most uncanny sense of deja vu as I read it on the train, like I'd just rediscovered something that I already knew. Particulalry when considered against the backdrop of the advances that are being made in Quantam Physics, and the idea that matter is merely potential with an infinite number of possibilities. Could it be possible that all the possible lives we could have led are playing themselves out on an endless time loop across an infinite number of realms.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again and again. Politicians do not know that they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycles of time. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again. Lovers making love the first time undress shyly, show surprise at the supple thigh, the fragile nipple. How would they know that each secret glimpse, each touch, will be repeated again and again and again, exactly as before?

On Marktgasse, it is the same. How could the shopkeepers know that each handmade sweater, each embroidered handkerchief, each chocolate candy, each intricate compass and watch will return to their stalls? At dusk, the shopkeepers go home to their families or drink beer in the taverns, calling happily to friends down the vaulted alleys, caressing each moment as an emerald on temporary consignment. How could they know that nothing is temporary, that all will happen again? No more than an ant crawling round the rim of a crystal chandelier knows that it will return to where it began.

In the hospital on Gerberngasse, a woman says goodbye to her husband. He lies in bed and stares at her emptily. In the last two months, his cancer has spread from his throat to his liver, his pancreas, his brain. His two young children sit on one chair in the corner of the room, frightened to look at their father, his sunken cheeks, the withered skin of an old man. The wife comes to the bed and kisses her husband softly on the forehead, whispers goodbye, and quickly leaves with the children. She is certain that this was the last kiss. How could she know that time will begin again, that she will be born again, will study at the gymnasium again, will show her paintings at the gallery in Zürich, will again meet her husband in the small library in Fribourg, will again go sailing with him in Thun Lake on a warm day in July, will give birth again, that her husband will again work for eight years at the pharmaceutical and come home one evening with a lump in his throat, will again throw up and get weak and end up in this hospital, this room, this bed, this moment. How could she know?

In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely. So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious remark in an argument between spouses, every opportunity denied because of a superior's jealousy, every promise not kept.

And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before. Some few people in every town, in their dreams, are vaguely aware that all has occurred in the past. These are the people with unhappy lives, and they sense that their misjudgments and wrong deeds and bad luck have all taken place in the previous loop of time. In the dead of night these cursed citizens wrestle with their bedsheets, unable to rest, stricken with the knowledge that they cannot change a single action, a single gesture. Their mistakes will be repeated precisely in this life as in the life before. And it is these double unfortunates who give the only sign that time is a circle. For in each town, late at night, the vacant streets and balconies fill up with their moans.

What unites us as human beings is our vunerability

2010-03-27T00:10:00.001Z

“What unites us as human beings is our vulnerability”.

I really like that quotation. It reminds me that no matter how scared or alone I feel, no matter how isolated or disconnected...that in the end, I am just the same as every other member of the human race. I am small, I am needy, I crave love, attention, warmth, happiness, comfort. We really aren’t so different in the grand scheme of things.

Sometimes I walk down the street and I think to myself “It’s incredible that my consciousness is just sitting there trapped in that small space inside my skull, with just a thin sheet of bone separating me from the rest of this ‘reality’ I perceive.” I think “It’s incredible that I am a human being that has been conscious for nearly 30 years, and with the exception of the deep sleep I experience without dreams, that for most of those 30 years I have been actively perceiving without cessation.”

Imagine if this were to just go on forever....would I not grow tired and weary of endless perception? Is this weariness of Samsara not the catalyst that leads one towards a more spiritual existence...and eventually towards full self realisation, enlightenment and liberation? Sometimes I am utterly convinced that I am growing tired of my mind, particularly when my self-awareness remains in such a heightened state that I can no longer be a part of the moment I am actually living. It’s as though I’ve become an observer to my own life, to my own thoughts, to my own spiritual transformation.

How much longer will I continue to perceive? How many more years do I have left? What year will I die? Will I be old and senile, losing my mind and unable to remember all of the questions I so desperately want answers to? Or will it happen sooner, taking me by surprise, and leaving me to face the full fear of the unknown head on. Can I even measure “life” in time, or is time just a construct human beings use to articulate the ineffable cycle of the universe? Of everything and nothing.

But if we are united as human beings, then surely this unity must extend to other living creatures on our planet? The animals, the birds, the trees, the fish – they too all have consciousness, they too must have their own sense of wonder, of curiosity... an interest in their surrounds. Sometimes I think that the planet itself is its own entity, alive in its own way. But to us as humans it remains completely unfathomable in so much as we, as its comprising parts, can never truly understand the real nature of how our planet lives. In much the same way as how one of our cells in our body is unable to comprehend the way in which it keeps us alive – of how it supports and nurtures a super structure that it cannot see itself to be a part of. When I think about the planet in this way, I see people who cause war and destruction to it as a kind of cancer. In the same way cancer in our own body is caused when a few normal cells change and start behaving in a way that is harmful and destructive to our body, so too do we as humans become cancerous to our “vessel”, when we fail to understand that we are supporting a living entity – the Earth – that requires us to function properly in order to sustain it.

What united us as human beings is our vulnerability, and what divides us is our ignorance. If you read this, please send me a comment. Sometimes I think nobody out there reads this blog. I guess even if they don't I'll continue to write it. But it's always nice to know.

Buddha please grant me the strength and determination to rise above the ignorance of my mind and to develop compassion as vast and plentiful as the ocean. Grant me the wisdom to realise my own true nature, as one wave amongst many in the great sea of humanity, rising and subsiding endlessly in the cyclic existence of Samsara.

Goodness procedes Greatness

2010-03-16T16:08:00.005Z

Here is a link to a brilliant article by Jon Foremen entitled ‘Goodness proceeds Greatness’. His article really touched me, and is incredibly relevant at a time when the people we boost into the stratosphere of stardom, more than often are the least deserving.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-foreman/goodness-precedes-greatne_b_322551.html

The link was posted on the blog of an incredibly talented young singer by the name of Brooke Fraser who originally hails from New Zealand. Brooke’s songs are incredibly beautifully written (she is both a pianist and songwriter)…the lyrics are like rich tapestries of wisdom woven together reaching right into your soul. Indeed the wisdom traversing her relatively small back catalogue belies her age - the song ‘Albertine’ is dedicated to the small girl by the same name she met visiting Rwanda. It's wonderful to see a truly talented artist using her gift to champion the truly downtrodden.

I am on a plane across a distant sea
But I carry you in me
and the dust on, the dust on, the dust on my feet
Rwanda

I will tell the world, I will tell them where I've been
I will keep my word
I will tell them Albertine

Also check out Brooke Fraser in her own words, on art, creativity and some insights on how she goes about the songwriting process.

http://brookefraser.com/blog/archives/260#more-260

Apple CEO Steve Jobs on coming face to face with one's own mortality

2010-03-11T16:04:00.002Z

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
-- Steve Job, CEO of Apple - currently battling pancreatic cancer

You are God

2010-03-10T19:07:00.011Z

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing

outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

-- Alan Watts, On the taboo of knowing who you are

An incredible story about reincarnation

2010-03-09T20:35:00.003Z

We do not come into this world, we come out of it

2010-03-08T21:33:00.005Z

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves,"the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals.
-- Alan Watts, On the taboo of knowing who you are

Our little life is but a brief dream in some divine mind

2010-03-08T16:05:00.001Z

                     Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

                     As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

                    Are melted into air, into thin air:

                     And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

                     The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,

                    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

                  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

                    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

                  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

                    As dreams are made on; and our little life

                  Is rounded with a sleep.

                                         The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

Impermanence

2010-03-08T15:31:00.006Z

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes -- or it prospers; and anon,

Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two -- is gone.
-- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1048–1131

CNN's Larry King interviews His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

2010-03-08T13:47:00.000Z

The long awaited interview with CNN’s Larry King and one of the most incredible human beings on the planet - Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, who has been living in exile Dharamsala in India since the Chinese invasion of Tibet on March 30th, 1959. One sincerely hopes this this gross miscarriage of justice is put right again in the near future so that Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan culture are preserved for future generations.

The Near Death Experience

2010-03-07T11:00:00.002Z

Within the Near Death Experience are the seeds of Man’s understanding of the universe, of love and of Oneness. For it is in the Near Death Experience that man releases his preconceived opinions, and allows the facts to come forward and be seen. It is as though he pulls aside a curtain of his own misconception and sees for the first time a truth that has always existed, a truth that is so profound, so persuasive, so undeniable that the experiencer’s life can never be the same.

The Truth of Oneness: that all men are part of the whole, not just six billion individuals, standing alone and apart, but six billion parts for making up the whole, the One, sharing and joining in the responsibility of life on this planet. Four billion people needing to work together, for the good of the world, not in opposition. We can accomplish our paradise on earth by cooperation, not by war, hate or deception.

The Truth of Love: that Love is the greatest strength of all. For Love given is Life received. For Love creates an environment of Love, cooperation and trust. It is Love given, that turns hate and mistrust into mutual respect and beneficial cooperation. There are nations in the world that have that Love. The Love results in open borders, free trade, open, honest exchange between people. There are nations that practice hate. The newspapers are filled with their terror, killings, bombings. There are two choices that are ours, and we must make a decision. NDEer’s learn or “know” the power of Love, and their lives change. It is a lesson that the world desperately needs, for we have led ourselves to the brink of our own destructions, by our own practices of greed and distrust and our “me-first attitudes”.

The Truth of Life: Death is not the end, but a transition to another Life. Think of the horror, the dread, that mankind has given itself, by believing that death is the end. How many millions of lives have been spent in grief for the “lost” loved ones, that have never been lost? Let us give our cooperation and support to these seeds that have been planted by the Near Death Experience. The experience is a gift. It is perhaps the beginning of a new life, not only for the Experiencer, but for our society and possibly the World.
Jack Cuthrell, author of “Letters of the Soul."

The Near Death Experience

Brevity

2010-03-07T10:07:00.003Z

Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

-- Robert Frost, 1923

Alan Watts on Death

2010-03-07T10:01:00.002Z

"Day after day we remember the days that have gone on before , even though there is the interval of sleep. Finally there comes a time when, if we consider what is to our true liking, we will want to forget everything that went before. Then we can have the extraordinary experience of seeing the world once again through the eyes of a baby – whatever kind of baby. Then it will be completely new and we will have all the startling wonder that a child has, all the vividness of perception which we wouldn’t have if we remembered everything forever. The universe is a system which forgets itself and then again remembers anew so there’s always constant change and constant variety in the span of time. It also does it in the span of space by looking at itself through every different living organism, giving an all around view....Therefore, you are virtually nothing. A hundred years from now you will be a handful of dust, and that will be for real. All right now, act on that reality. And out of that...nothing. You will suddenly surprise yourself: The more you know you are nothing the more you will amount to something."

Death, the Afterlife and Human Being

2010-02-28T19:11:00.003Z

My response to Heidi's beautifully written piece on Death, the Afterlife and Human Being

http://www.virushead.net/vhrandom/2008/03/15/death-the-afterlife-and-human-being

Heidi,
This is a wonderfully written and beautifully expressed blog entry on one of the most intriguing subjects in the world – i.e. what is our true nature. I must say whenever I have a spare moment in the day I find myself contemplating questions such as these…endlessly pondering the infinite possibilities of what ‘it’ is all about. What will death feel like? What comes next? What am I supposed to learn in this lifetime in order to be prepared for whatever it is that comes next? Is the law of karma real, and if so, have my actions been sufficiently good to merit a better future life? These questions are not also easy to grapple with, indeed the contemplation of one’s mortality and ideas of ‘non-existence’ goes against our ego’s innate instinct to not think about its own destruction, to go on living life as though our place in this world is permanent (the biggest delusion of all, and the one in my opinion which leads to so much selfishness and suffering throughout the human race.)

I will respectfully disagree with you on one point that nobody really knows what happens after death. There are people who know what happens next, they are very wise and very learned people who feel the magnitude of the universe coursing through their veins. They know what our real nature is. They get it. But even if they wanted to tell us, and some of them do…how many of us would really ever be prepared to listen or believe them? But I know they are there and they are blessed - whether it be through luck, wisdom, or perhaps a spiritual element to their beings that has been progressively developed over many lifetimes (in Buddhism this type of person is revered to as a bodhisattva) – and they are the ones who continue to return to earthly existence in order to try and ease the suffering of others and to ensure that the cumulative wisdom of the ages is not lost.

Meditation is one way to visit the divine realm. Through many years of diligent practice you can achieve a level of consciousness that eventually reveals all. Some would call this becoming enlightened. Entheogens used in shamanic rituals such as Ayahuasca and plants containing Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) are also capable of opening that door in your mind which seems to be otherwise blocked by the ego or self. I am not condoning these drugs, indeed many would disagree and say that the affects produced by these drugs are mere hallucinations. Having used them myself to produce an unintentional near death experience I can tell you the realm I went to was unequivocally a real place….the ONLY real place in my opinion…the ultimate reality. Call it what you will, the cosmos, god, the universe, universal consciousness. But it exists and I need only read other people’s accounts of where they’ve been and what they saw – accounts which they have somehow managed to describe in words better than I could have ever chosen myself, to know that many experience the exact same phenomenon I went through, right down to a tee.
Anyway food for thought, thanks again for your thought provoking post. It was really comforting to know that other people out there have the same thoughts as me. (I’m not going crazy afterall)
James

Dying by Alex Grey

2010-02-27T00:03:00.001Z

What does it feel like to die?

2010-02-26T23:40:00.008Z

What does it feel like to die?
A near death experience induced by Ketamine
"A place to live unharmed by death
Does not exist
Not in space, not in the sea
Nor if you stay in the midst of mountains."
--Buddha

Buddha says that a healthy contemplation of death throughout your lifetime helps to counteract the misguided notion that life is permanent. Yet ironically we who live in the West are rarely privy to the one phenomenon that we will certainly come to us all. Nothing in life is certain, except that on day life as we know it will be no longer. Death is hidden away, swept under the carpet, kept behind closed doors. And the reasons for this are as numerous as they are varied, death is private, it is sad, it forces us to confront our mortality, to take a long hard look at our life and to decide whether or not we are satisfied that we have put our time on earth to good use. Did I make a difference? Has my life amounted to something? Did I learn whatever it is I was put on earth to learn? These are all questions that resonate amongst all of us as members of the human race, regardless of our culture, our nationality or our religion. But if death is hidden away from us, and if the culture we are brought up in eschews the idea of contemplating death; considers it to be morbid and unnatural. Then how are we ever to understand what death is? What does it feel like to die?

Two years ago I experienced death, and the experience was so enormous, so profound, that the memory I have of it has been seared into my inner most being and will remain with me until the day I experience it again in earnest. For me death was the most incredible, breathtaking, terrifying, eye-opening and deeply, deeply spiritual experience I have ever had. It quite literally brought me to my knees, it unleashed an inhuman scream, a scream that rippled across the universe. It was the scream of a being experiencing his true nature for the first time. My near death experience occurred two years ago, and although I have only just now plucked up the motivation to write about it, not one day has gone by when I haven’t thought of it and revisited the place I was transported to. The realm of the eternal. Thedivine source.

I was 27 when I decided to take ketamine for the third or fourth time. I had experimented with several recreational drugs over the past decade, but had never really experienced the dissociative effects high doses of ketamine can induce. And although I had used lower doses of ketamine before, this experience was only the second time that I had entered a k-hole – that endlessly looping and almost robotic “cartoon-i-verse” which seems to lie just behind the curtain of reality. And even now, some two years later, trying to put this utterly ineffable experience into words stretches the English language to its limits. The experience took me to soaring highs, producing feelings of bliss and ecstatic love for the world and the people in it, but simultaneously it also took me to a place of unadulterated horror, where the darkness and the sheer dread and hopelessness forced me to see that the state we refer to as “hell” does exist...and for a moment I was given a glimpse into all that is evil and wrong with mankind – like a horrid divine experiment that had gone terribly wrong and had begun rotting and eating away at itself. The culmination of this ketamine experience resulted in me being carried out of a nightclub kicking and screaming, convinced that I had just experienced my own death. A death as breathtakingly beautiful and perfect as it was terrifying and life changing. I am not sure what part of me died that night, but one thing is clear, when I woke up the next morning back in the reality I had always known, I was an immensely different and a fundamentally more spiritual and altruistic person

Entering into what I can only refer to as the ‘world of k’ was to me like entering into another dimension or reality which exists behind the scenes of the reality in which we all play out our lives. It’s like seeing the great wheels and cogs that comprise the machinery of the universe endlessly revolving in upon themselves - as they have done for aeons. One has the strange sense that time and space do not exist, and as such, one begins to truly begin to understand the concept of ‘eternity’, a strange and unsettling feeling which courses through your inner most self... like the slow recollection of an old truth you have always known, and at the same time, always managed to forget, time and time again. In this particular case the fall into the k hole was both sharp and almost immediate. A sense of foreboding overcame me, as if I had taken a bite of the forbidden apple and consequently forever condemned myself to the dark, robotic and surreal k-dimension. I recall thinking, “Why did you take the k, now you have enslaved yourself into the k-dimension, you have infected yourself with the drug, and now whilst you may continue to live your everyday existence and reality, you will forever be bound to this darker side of reality and subject to being thrown back into the world of k at any given moment. The world of k is horrifically real as an experience – in some ways even more real than reality, it’s as if ketamine acts as some sort of chemical key which allows your cerebral cortex to unlock the part of your brain capable of accessing this dimension. Like a radio tuner all of sudden rewired to pick up not just other radio stations on air, but also capable of seeing the antenna, the sound waves and all the equipment which facilitates the broadcast.

The most frightening and simultaneously enlightening aspect of a high ketamine dose as its ability to produce a schizophrenic break and completely obliterate the ego.

“To produce a schizophrenic break you need to collapse the ego, preferably as rapidly as possible. There are different ways of defining the ego but I define it thusly: The ego is a structure of the personality that is made up of what we believe to be true about ourselves, others, the world around us, and our place in it. We form these beliefs as based on our relationships, our experiences, the roles we play and the activities we engage in. All of these combined, create our ego -- which is, for most of us, our sense of who we are.”… "The overall experience is described as falling into a kind of abyss of isolation. This comes about because there is such a discrepancy between the subjective inner world that one has been swept into, and the mundane everyday world outside…. It is like falling into a death - not only a death state, but also a death space - the "afterlife," the "realm of the ancestors," the "land of the dead," the "spirit world." The common experience here is for the person to look about and think that half the people around him are dead too. While in this condition, it's very hard for one to tell if one is really alive or not."

For me it was as though I had somehow managed to tear through the fabric of reality and to step behind the scenes of the world. Everything moved in slow motion in an endless cycle. The universe is cyclical, perfect and eternal - it had no beginning and it will never have an end, after all, how could it?...when time and space are mere concepts that we perceive through our unavoidably human experience. Life is nothing more than our divine creator playing out a grand eternal game through us, the characters he has created. Life is God’s way of perceiving himself.

"Right away at the beginning, the death experience is accompanied by the feeling that you've gone back to the beginning of time. This involves a regression, a return to the state of infancy in one's personal life history. But hand in hand with this is the feeling of slipping back into the world of the primordial parents, into a Garden of Eden. For example, it's a very common experience to feel one is the child of Adam and Eve, say, at the beginning of time. This is very symbolic, obviously. It's pretty much a representation of the psyche at the start of one's individual career after birth."

I remember distinctly having memories of Adam and Eve and the other narratives I’d read about in the bible. Words and phrases would rise in my mind, as though the entire experience was being narrated to me by some divine voice. Or perhaps it was just my own voice. The voice of the eternal "I" that had always been there underneath "self" but who had been drowned out by the incessant chatter of the mind. The phrase “That’s life” passed through my mind again and again as though I was realising for the first time what "life" actually was. I remember seeing language as an entity unto itself, seeing the spirit of language… it is alive and it sustains this life as we transmit it from generation to generation. I remember seeing all the meaning bundled up in a word like "love" and feeling it with the same intensity as if for that split second the voices of every single human being who had ever uttered it were coursing through my mind. I remember the phrase "The Game of Life" passing through my stream of consciousness and laughing as I saw for the first time the mechanics of this game unfolding before my eyes. I remember repeating a word over and over in my head. It was not an English word and to this day I don’t know how to write it or what language it is. Phonetically it sounded like “Thuck ah dun dunstall.” I do however know what the word means. The word being spoken to me from the inner most depths of my soul was my name, not the name I have been given in this lifetime, but my eternal name, the name I have remembered at the point of all my previous deaths, and the name I will continue to remember for as many lives as I am forced to wander through Samsaric existence. I saw all the people in my life as though they were characters in ‘my story’, some of them good, some of them malevolent...but all of them were there for a purpose, to teach me something about myself, to allow me to grow as a spirit. It was as though we were all intertwined in a great eternal narrative and that each of us in our various lives plays a role in order for others to grow.

Suddenly it was as though everybody in the room turned to face me and I felt all of the cells in my body tremble. The thought passed through my consciousness, "I am about to die… I know what’s going to happen now…this moment is about to be the moment of my death." I felt all the people in the room turn in slow motion to look at me, as though something profound was about to happen. Again there was a primordial word for it that I heard from someone in the room. "He’s about to go through his……(then the primordial word for death)."

Then there was the moment of death itself, the final frame on the film of my life. It felt as though all the energy in my body culminated to a single point between my eyes.... and then reached breaking point. Then it felt as though all the cells in my body suddenly turned to water and I quite literally felt myself collapse into the ground, back into the very universe from which I first sprung. As I collapsed I let out a god awful scream, like the release of all the pain I had ever known in my life...it was an inhuman scream from the very depths of my soul. To this day my friends who were with me say they have never heard a person make a sound like that, it seemed to have erupted from somewhere deep inside me, a sacred cathartic release. I was screaming the word for my name, as though this unearthly scream of my primordial name could somehow force me to remember who I was and where I had come from. I knew then that I was experiencing my own death unfold, I felt a sort of a guiding presence trying to tell me that what I was now going through was a natural progression in the higher scheme of things, that it was a process that everyone had a time and a moment reserved for them to die, and that everything that was about to unfold was a perfectly normal step in the process. At the time I felt like every person in the room surrounding me had already passed though into the next realm and that they were there to witness and guide me as I passed through to join them. I collapsed kicking and screaming to the ground, I felt a guiding force instructing me to do so, to release all the anger and the pain of life out of my body, to cleanse myself. I honestly believed that each and everyone one of them, at their chosen point in time, had also undergone this experience. Finally I saw the faces of two of my friends as they picked me up and it was as though somehow all the cells in my body reformed and I came out the other side. It was as though for one brief instant instead of cycling in upon itself, the universe passed one cycle through my body. As I got up I could see my two close friends comforting me "See, you’re going to be ok, it’s ok. You’re going to be ok because death is not the end, it is just the end of one cycle and the beginning of another"

“All kinds of imagery comes tumbling across the field of awareness. It's like the mythological image in a perfect stained-glass window being smashed, and all the bits and pieces being scattered. The effect is very colourful, but it's very hard to discern how the pieces belong to each other. Any attempt to make sense of it is an exercise in abstraction from the actual experience. The important thing is to find the process running through it all.”

I also distinctly remember a feeling of fear and terror which came from feeling like I’d popped out of reality and into this great eternal loop. My friend and I would be thrown together, intertwined, both with gaunt eyes filled with horror, begging each other to try and remember, to “never forget”…but each time we would pass through another cycle, sure enough, we seemed to be back to the place where we had begun, forever trapped in this world we had dared venture into. I remember the songs lyrics playing in the club “Funky disco” playing in a long, monotone drawn out fashion in my head, on some sort of loop. This loop experience is also characteristic of the k-world itself, indeed one of the overwhelming thoughts that continued to pervade my k experience with my friend was that I had in fact enslaved myself into the k-world, which is a world effectively on a loop…complete with its dark inhabitants – the darker side of humanity, the twisted and contorted faces, bodies that appeared to be made from stone of the individuals serve as a constant reminder that these are the individuals who had chosen to try k, and had thus effectively ensnared themselves in the k-loop – a world from which they would never find any escape, and would be damned to inhabit for the rest of eternity, with no possibility of death, no peace, no nothingness.

Walking out of the club onto the road where I had spent so many nights with my friends over the years was like walking out into bliss. I saw the faces of all the people I had ever loved, and as the process wore on I felt the veil which obscures all the mysteries of life falling down all around me. I felt that I finally understood. In particular I felt a deep connection with language and the way we use language to construct meaning around us. I remember contemplating certain words and turns of phrases in English, and finally understanding a deeper meaning, how they fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is life, and how they are but the building blocks of all those who have gone before us – the very spirits I was about to encounter as I moved into the next realm. I saw all the people I had ever thought I had loved - some brief encounters, other more lasting as finally my image settled on a friend of mine – my one true soul mate. I saw him in a light that I had never seen him in before, I felt the love and the connection building in me like a volcano, I lay down on the road in front of me and let it all out in a tide of tears and screaming. I was screaming I love you, god I f**cking love you. I finally felt bound to someone, the right one, and I now felt that we would be moving together as one in the next realm as one unit. As two beautiful souls bound eternally together. I realised then the meaning of life, as I saw our two souls parting together, and my human conscious re-preparing itself to enter the earthly realm as a new spirit. I was convinced that one part of me was about to be born again as a new child, although in this particular experience it never occurred, or if it did occur I was not aware of it whilst it was happening. As I neared the end of my death I felt euphoria, I was screaming ‘That’s life’, that’s what life is! I was blown away by the sheer magnitude of life force – that which we call god – but what I experienced as an omnipresent energy from which all life is derived. I felt complete, I felt whole, I felt peace. But no light can exist without darkness and shortly after this euphoric epiphany I began to feel the darkness again - the terror and the evil that is also life. As I held onto my friend he began to disintegrate in my arms. I bit him savagely on the chest to try and hold onto him, drawing blood and causing him to cry out – I had wanted to try and keep part of him with me, to stop the erosion. But he began to melt away, as did the feeling of bliss and euphoria. The guiding presence told me that I needed to experience all that is life, not merely the good, but also the bad. I heard my friend saying “Don’t forget how good this was and I’ll see you next time our spirits rejoin’. But I also simultaneously felt the guiding presence telling me that soon all would be forgotton, that my conscience would be reset, and that still deep down below this world of bliss, of heaven and of euphoria, was the world of K, the mechanical, robotic ‘loop’ world which underpins reality. That I was forever bound to it, and knowing that fact every time I came to dying in my future lives was ultimately a hell that I was bound to endure. Life is suffering, and as long as humanlust shackles us to the physical planes, we shall be bound to endure it.

My death was truly the most breathtakingly beautiful yet simultaneously utterly terrifying experience I have ever gone through. As I was laying out on the road I felt as though I saw the people who had played a significant role in my life as though for the first time - like they were shedding their masks and I was seeing them in a way that I had been unable to do during my life. I understood the roles they had played in shaping me, in allowing me to grow and learn as a spirit and I felt an overwhelming love for all of them which overwhelmed and consumed every essence of my being. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is that I saw their spirits…their essence… I felt their light and their warmth, and was overwhelmed by the collective wisdom and knowledge that I saw within them. I felt as though I was amongst very old and very wise spirits who were guiding me and helping me grow and move into a new, higher realm. I felt privileged to have had them in my life. This included both those who had caused me harm, and those who had brought me love and happiness. I understood for the first time that they were all, in essence, incredible spirits that in my death brought me a feeling of peace and belonging that I had never known in my mortal life. I felt a connection to the universe and to these spirits, my friends, that made me realise for the first time that death is not at all something to be feared, and that most importantly that my connection to these great spirits would be eternal. As the earthly faces of my friends were one by one unveiled, and as I saw each of them as if for the first time, I witnessed the essence of who they truly were and I finally understood what it is to love someone, and just how beautiful and special each of them truly is. I remember finally understanding that we are all at various stages in lives, lives that begin and lives that end. As I lay there experiencing my death on the road I felt at peace, that death was not something to be feared but to be embraced, and that when my time eventually did come, this understanding that I had been given a glimpse of in my k-hole would reveal itself in its entirety. That the energy which powers us as humans is eternal, and that whilst I was one thing in this life, I was male, I was someone who chose to use drugs, I was someone who was not religious, etc... that in my next lifetime I would be someone else. That life itself was eternal, even if my life was not. That on my ‘next time around’ so to speak, that I would experience things from a different point of view, perhaps as another person, perhaps simply as another animal or being somewhere. I remember laughing at those who had told me that the way I had lived my life was wrong knowing that after the death of their physical selves that the energy that is them could return as somebody like me. That their values were only contingent on their physical surrounds and of their geographic place in the world. I felt a new sense that our concepts of right and wrong were quite arbitrary, that life itself was so infinitely grand and all consuming that those mistakes or wrongs that we committed on the earthly plane were in the grand scheme of things were of little relevance. That all the goodness that exists in humanity can only be so with the necessary existence of all that is bad with humanity. That both goodness and evil are life, and that life itself is so infinitely grand and amazing, that in the end all we as human beings can do is surrender to the infinite divine source from which we were manifested, and allow the circle to come around, and to return home.

Thoughts, similar experiences on ketamine or other Entheogens? Write to me
anoceanofjoy@gmail.com

The Bodhisattva Vow

2010-02-25T22:01:00.005Z

"As long as sentient beings suffer and remain, I will remain and serve. This is how any hour, any day or year, any century or millennium, even aeons become meaningful. Life has no meaning but what we give it. If one wastes one's life with meaningless activities, even one day of life is too long."

The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.

2010-02-25T21:37:00.003Z

Sooner of later, life as you know it will change. It will change in an instant and you will never be able to go back to the person you used to be.

2010-02-25T21:24:00.003Z

It’s funny how I thought I knew myself. After all - I had spent 27 years of my life listening, learning, reading, debating...figuring out who I was and affirming that identity by surrounding myself with "likeminded people". I paid attention to the news, I threw myself into a wide variety of social activities, I made friends easily and learnt to value the importance of good relationships. I travelled, I finished high school with good grades, went on to University and completed a Bachelor Degree in International Studies, learnt another language, began a Master Degree in International Politics, and even scrimped and saved to go and live and study abroad for three years in Canada and France. I considered myself to be a genuine, kind person, well travelled, confident - but not arrogant, approachable and fair. I thought I was leading a good life.

But most importantly or all I considered myself to be an atheist. Of all the things that I was adamant about in my life, one of the strongest was my denial of the existence of any "God". I saw religion as the cause of endless conflict and suffering across the human race, the catalyst for almost every war ever fought, a useless outdated institution that served only to divide humans into the "us" and the "them". I would debate the topic for hours with friends reasoning that places like hell and heaven were ludicrous concepts, "How could anybody ever warrant eternal damnation for their earthly mistakes?" "Wouldn’t the idea of an eternity in bliss eventually become intolerable – much akin to a diet consisting entirely of chocolate, surely that which brings you pleasure and indulgence without cessation would ultimately result in you feeling sick and craving for change?"... even if that change were for the worse surely it would be better than an eternity of nothing but happiness.

There was absolutely no question or hesitation in my mind for the first 27 years of my life that what I believed was correct. I was the product of an easy going life in Australia, a great life it must be said, but one that never really caused me to bring into question any of my beliefs... nor one that really caused me any suffering or sadness. In short ‘Australia’ my wonderful country of birth had instilled in me an identity thas was so rock solid, in was unchangeable. Or so I thought. I come from a very typical middle class background. I was born in Darwin in Northern Australia in 1981, but spent my entire childhood growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne in the south of the country. I was blessed to have a very happy childhood with two loving parents and a sister that was, and still is like a best friend to me. As a gay man I was also extremely fortunate to have a family that accepted me for who I was when I came out as a teenager, as well as a group of friends that loved me unconditionally for who I was. Like most Australians I enjoyed drinking and going out partying. I went to my first gay nightclub in Melbourne when I was 15 years old with a group of older friends. I remember driving there in the back of a friend’s car with Madonna’s 'Don’t Cry for Me Argentina' blaring out of the speakers at a thousand decibels. My friends huddled me into the club in the middle of the group as I was ushered past the bouncer who clearly failed to notice my baby smooth skin and the absence of even a single hair on my face. He certainly made no attempt to stop me and question me for I.D...and thus as I walked through that black curtain and into the smoke filled room that lay beyond, a whole new world opened up to me. I spent the night drinking Midori illusion shots from a shaker and dancing amongst a sea of fresh faces. It was the late nineties, the music was upbeat - Ace of Base, La Bouche, the Real McCoy reverberated throughout the entire venue. The crowd was good looking, young and cosmopolitan. This club in Melbourne would be the scene of many of the best nights of my life. A place where friendships were forged and where friendships were broken. A place where the entire course of my life could be altered on a single night…that cute boy on the dance floor might become my boyfriend and spend a further 12 months by my side, or perhaps it would just be an innocent fling. Anything was possible, and it was this “possibility” that excited me the most and kept me going back for more.

This club would also be the scene of the single most important event of my life. The night everything I thought I believed in and everything I’d ever known was brought to a grinding halt and I was brought face to face with my inner most nature. That night was the death of my ego, and the beginning of the emergence of the person I am today. This blog is my attempt to try and keep some sort of record of that journey.

Ego Death

2010-02-25T18:22:00.001Z