The Promise: Presence and Ecstasy
Imagine walking around in daily life, easeful and light and joyful and shimmering. Imagine feeling transcendent while still being fully present in your body and fully related to other people. What if this was not a peak experience but an ordinary state of consciousness? This feeling could be called “being Enlightened” or, literally walking around filled with the light. Or more accurately, with an awareness that one is filled with the light, always connected and always belonging…where the umbilical cord to spirit is intact.
It might be hard to visualize this, especially if we’re walking around in a traumatized, blunted, shut-down reality, on a treadmill of soul-numbing work, small dramas and existential dread, grabbing for that tequila or chocolate or credit card swipe or the little dopamine hits of likes and comments. Yet, even these compulsions can be seen as intelligent adaptations: they help you feel good, at least for a moment. And they are pointing toward what you know deep in your soul, namely that life should feel good. All addictions are seeking after this ease. They are our own wisdom is at work, because you know your birthright is ecstasy, belonging, and un-self-conscious joy. We know we should feel better. We just might not know how to reliably and consistently get there.
I was lucky to glimpse, from a very young age, this illuminated, shimmering reality. It’s kind of like a backlit scrim, where the light pervades and shines out from everything we see in the material world- it runs in and through and behind and around everything. Some material forms are more dense, and it’s harder to perceive the ensouled world, but it’s still there. And, yet, I often forgot, and as I grew older and gained responsibility, I couldn’t as reliably get back home to this awareness- my daily work and family life pasted over it.
I tried very hard to get there inside of prescribed methods and contexts. I tried to access the feeling in mainline religion, and there were moments of surrender and transmission and joy there- I even ran adult ed at a church and taught Sunday school!-.but church type faith didn’t work to make life feel reliably better.
I still felt separate.
I knew that the promise made at the time of my birth, my soul’s contract, was that I was to live in a body while fully conscious and aware of the presence of spirit all the time. In my early 30s, I made a choice that I was going to find out how to live that way, no matter what it took. That’s also when meditation and yoga found me.
It turns out there are millions and millions of people around the world, who also hear this call to the sacred, and who live with deep meaning, connection and ritual, without the violence of separation identities that can come with formal affiliations. Many have developed (or been granted) reliable ways of getting to this state of being. Some of these modalities are thousands of years old, and many are taboo or even illegal- probably because they are potent, and they work. They are tools and technologies that result in happy, sovereign, unafraid people. Conspiracy theories aside, I believe that these methods are shamed, sidelined and targeted by religious and conservative hierarchies, as well as entrenched industries that profit off of our suffering and entrainment in unjust systems, because of their potency.
We need happy healthy awake people. We need each of us, remembering who we really are, vibrated and dreamt into being, a continuation of life’s lineage, the culmination of evolution up until now, and the inspirers of the future. Not us playing small, not constricted, not holding back or afraid, but fully living the contract we made when our souls first embodied.
When I was started working on “Mantra, Tantra, Ayahuasca” in 2016, it was intended as a tour through American Vedanta, American Bhakti, the microdosing cultures, festival culture, the neogaian underground, right handed tantra (non-sexual), left handed tantra (sexual), polyamory, gender fluidity, radical honesty, eco-spirituality, unity consciousness and other liberation theologies. It was an extension of the work I was doing in my prior book Indivisible. But it’s not where it ended. I put the philosophical analysis on the shelf and headed out into the field, writing down these experiments and experiences one at a time. It ended as a collection of stories, sticking with the personal and the direct encounter. The deeper I went into the work, the more the whole world became that way: more localized, more direct, less abstracted. Less about big ideas and more about authentic, direct gnosis.
So, I’m going to tell some stories, and share things I learned, and what I have come to believe (up until now), and I hope you will run them through the filter of your own sensibilities and inner knowing and find something of value for your freedom journey.
Some things I know now: you can have the feeling of being an individual, but at the same time belonging to the whole. You can live with a feeling of being completely playful and open, unselfconscious, not anxious, without confusion or doubt. That you are not simply “enough”, but rather you are divine and essential. Not just “well” but fluidly perfect. You can live in awakened direct perception, vital, receptive, where your whole body is both antenna and a transmitter. You, too, can tap in to the invisible underlying ground of reality, and even have moments of existing as only energy, only love.
You can be reliably happy, connected and in joy.
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