Epilogue: What I Saw

This chapter: about 2,768 words, roughly 10 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.

Feel free to take everything I say here with a giant grain of salt. I recognize that it will lose many of my readers, and possibly even retroactively harm the credibility of the book, but I feel I must say it.

Years ago, in a state brought on by mushrooms, every layer of my capacity for self-deception was stripped from me. I saw how the reality I experience is a construction of my own mind—and how “my own mind” doesn’t refer to meat in my skull, which is itself part of the “reality I experience.”

I somehow construct all of reality, and you do too, and when I saw it, both were plainly true. I don’t know how to turn that into an internally consistent metaphysics, and I now think reality is far too strange to be fit inside one. But this isn’t solipsism: you are every bit as real as me (which is to say, only conventionally so).

I was taken through my entire mind, from the surface down to the deepest layers. As each layer was peeled back, I was exposed to all my flaws and all my wrongdoings. There were untold thousands; far more than I normally realized. I was shown all the harm I had caused, how it had impacted others, and how far it traveled. And I was shown how some part of me had always known it, even as I did it. I felt how each act was evil, and yet simultaneously innocent—the paradox I still find hardest to hold.

The deeper layers are harder to describe, but the very deepest is the simplest. There was only a pure singularity: blinding white Light; infinite Love. It was self-evidently the Source of creation, and I was That, and so, I saw, is everyone.

I trusted it the way you trusted the knowledge of always having known you’d done wrong: it wasn’t something new being added to my experience, but what was there when the layers of hiding were removed. I saw that I had always known it, and that it was never truly absent from my experience. It’s still there in me now when I look, and as best I can tell, there in you too.

That Light (capitalized here because I mean more by it than Chapter 2 could show) is the thing we’re all oriented to, whether we know it or not, because it’s what we are. It’s Home. We’re used to explaining Love through selfish genes, even the stranger in Chapter 4 who dove in after somebody else’s child. I don’t doubt that’s how a creature like him came to be able to do it. But what if what moved in him when he jumped is the thing that frameworks can’t hold? Then Darwin is just the way we explain Love in our particular reality. One way or another, Love shows up in all realities, because they’re ultimately made of it. Each one is just remembering in its own way. Every action we take is either a step back toward it, or away from it—and that choice doesn’t just affect us, because of what I saw next.

I find this part hard to reconstruct, and I hold it the way the traditions hold their stories. The description I find most resonance with comes from A Course in Miracles, in Kenneth Wapnick’s reading; its beginning, a first lapse with no motive behind it and no one at fault, is also where the Dzogchen prayer called the Aspiration of Samantabhadra begins.

At some point, for no discernible reason, there was a forgetting of what I was: a lapse, not a crime, and not a real departure either, since there’s nowhere else to be. Along with it came the fear that it was real: that I had betrayed God, and lost my goodness, or never had it. That was unbearable. My only option was to hide, which I did by creating an other to blame and judge. If he’s the bad one, I’m not. That process spiraled and got out of hand, creating the entire reality where I normally live, which is dominated by projection onto each other of this primal guilt. We now wander that reality, feeling forsaken at a level we rarely cognize.

None of this unfolds in time: the appearance of separate people at all, me here and you there, is what that first forgetting looks like from inside, and it only ever happens now—because time itself is one of the things being hallucinated. Even now I can see the sense in which I’m constructing time. I believe other people are also me because I saw it clearly once, and it’s not the kind of thing I can simply unsee.

(Some traditions put it as not-one and not-two. Not one, because you aren’t something I’m imagining; not two, because nothing tells what’s looking out of you apart from what’s looking out of me. When I say other people are also me, that’s what I mean.)

From this perspective, we are keeping each other from returning Home because we’re afraid we don’t deserve it ourselves. I’m on the lam from the Light, trying to get Home by the one road that can’t get there: keeping others from it. Every look of contempt is a step down that road, and every step makes the separation more real in the world I experience. For me, the only way back is forgiveness, given and received, which turn out to be one act, since there was never anything to forgive but the turning. No one who was hurt owes it to anyone. This, I think, is where the idea of original sin comes from, and why the only solution is, indeed, to reorient to that which is most true; why only “he who is without sin” may “cast the first stone.” Why “judge not, lest ye be judged.” And why none of that means being a pushover, or abandoning judgment in its sense of “wise discernment.”

I was also shown what it was like to drift beyond my normal state: to become progressively more confused, further from the Light, trusting the voice of the darkness. I was taken the whole way, on a tour of what a mind must go through to get from the Light to pure darkness. The pain, the confusion, the insanity—it broke my heart a million times over, and then a million times again. It was the first time “compassion for evil people” made sense. People can only want that state to the degree they’ve forgotten what Home is like.

I saw how terrifyingly quickly I could slide down that path myself, and how much less it was my personal qualities that protected me, and how much more it was my circumstances. There but for the grace of God go I. What would stop the slide isn’t becoming a “better person” in the conventional sense—fighting for the right team by hating the wrong one. Quite the opposite. It’s refusing contempt in all its forms, at all times: staying firmly committed to the Light.

And I was shown my drift from outside, too. When I was closer to the Light, more people “loved” me, and the further I drifted, the more they started to hate me and feel justified shoving me deeper in, just as I had done in their shoes. Eventually I hit rock bottom. I could feel what others were telling me, because I had told it to others so many times:

You will be humanity’s sacrifice. The dumping ground for our collective shadow. I’m sorry to have to do this to you, but it’s the only way to keep our hands clean. Good luck.

That’s what the people we call evil are for. René Girard saw the scapegoat at the root of human groups; what I saw was what the scapegoat is told. The physical cruelty may be the smallest part of it. The greater part is letting them know that they’re where we keep what we’ve disowned, that all of us know it, and that there’s nothing they can do about it. That’s how the road back gets cut off. (The person who hurt you is still the exception Chapter 3 made; this is about what I did.)

But a tiny handful always showed, through their eyes and their behavior, that although what I was doing was unacceptable, and they would stop it, they would never forsake me. They weren’t just refusing to let me misbehave; they were refusing to let the darkness claim another soul. And it wasn’t a personal decision on their part. It was the Light acting through them. I now think of them as its keepers.

That’s when I realized I could be the same for others. To hold the Light for them, even (and especially) when they couldn’t hold, or even see, it themselves. Truth be told, I’m still a long ways off from being that person, but there’s clearly no greater goal in life.

These days, when contempt starts to rise between me and someone, I can almost feel our parasites reaching out toward one another, like a secret handshake being offered. If I choose contempt, I’ve accepted the offer, and bound the world a little tighter in darkness. There’s another handshake on offer, between the parts underneath, and it’s what the second stranger did, and what those few did for me. It has no team. Whoever offers it isn’t on your side or the other side; their only allegiance is to the Light.

So far some of what I’ve said may be familiar to some of you. Some of what follows may be less so.

Ideas that live in our collective shadow manifest “externally,” taking shape in our physical reality. The ones that are most deeply buried never quite make it all the way to full physical manifestation—they lurk in the shadows of reality, where people sense their presence but attribute different meaning to it, depending on disposition.

The most deeply buried is the sense of the evil global conspiracy. I won’t say it’s real, and I won’t say it’s not. It doesn’t exist in the way physical matter does, but it’s not just a fantasy, either. Our collective self-deception, the background hum, takes on a structure that, for all intents and purposes, functions exactly the way you’d expect a real one to function, but that will never quite take the shape we desperately want, where we can violently punish the people in charge.

I have met the people in charge, and they are I.

Which, again, is not to say that real conspiracies don’t also exist, or that we shouldn’t fight them with everything we have. But as far as I can tell, this is the one they all ultimately depend on. Every time I weaken my own contribution to it, I make them the tiniest bit less able to function. I saw my own contribution plainly. My hatred for the people destroying the rainforest was creating a world in which the rainforest would be destroyed. My contempt for the British who held down my people, and for anyone who looks down on Indians now, would just ensure they saw me as necessary to hold down—and part of me needed that, so that my contempt could keep justifying itself. All sorts of hypocrisies, from hating Amazon while constantly relying on them; to hating shadowy government cabals that my first-world luxuries probably rely on, were laid bare. I still haven’t cleaned up my act, so make of that what you will.

Under all of it ran the background hum in me, and I saw what it had been doing the whole time. It was nudging reality, continually, into a state of forgetting: getting it to reflect otherness back to me, so that I would “know” otherness was the truth. Its deepest form is one we hardly notice: the world held as dead matter, there to be used for our benefit. That’s contempt for the world itself, the contempt the others grow out of, and it’s so common it passes for realism. Contempt for an enemy was the clearest case of that mechanism, the one place it can be shown step by step. That’s why I wrote a book to take it apart: we believe what we can check.

And part of me always knew where the darkness was headed. Chapter 1’s deepest layer was that I needed my enemy to carry my darkness. Under that was one more: my mind isn’t separate from the world, so it was never only reaching him. Every turn added to the darkness of the whole, and a world that has forgotten the Light was what it had been after all along. That’s why I see one Devil and not many. The darkness in every mind is after the same world.

I saw why hiding stuff from myself could never work, because part of me always saw that I was doing it, and that part was essentially God, and God is reality, so knowledge of my wrongdoing always takes physical shape in my “external” world. (That world is yours as much as mine, made by all of us at once. So nothing that happens to anyone, an illness, a loss, what someone else did to them, is anyone else’s to read as a sign of what they did. This is about the harm I do.) The feeling of getting away with something now elicits a laugh—which is not to say that I never try. It’s a long learning process.

My mind sometimes wants to object; to believe that there’s no universal orientation I’m bound by. The way I evaluate it now is to look, very closely, whether some part of me knows I am deceiving myself. When the answer is yes, I can already see the pain it will cause and how I will eventually have to own it, in this life or whatever comes after.

As best I can tell, all the harm I’ve caused through my self-deception still lives in the world somewhere, waiting for me to clean it up. It got there via chains of causality I’m normally incapable of recognizing (and perhaps am not meant to, while still lost in the “dream”). And the surest sign it’s still out there is that I still contemptuously judge others—which I still do, a lot.

The same holds the other way. No act of love done when nobody is watching is lost; it goes out by the same chains. There have been times I was about to break, about to give up on the part of me that knows, and something held, just enough. I’ve come to believe that some of those times, what held was someone I’ll never meet, doing something decent with nobody watching. I like to tell myself that every time we do this, we give the Devil the middle finger.

What let me see any of this was that I was held in the Light the whole time I was being shown. Exposed any other way, I’d have done what anyone does when their darkness is exposed with contempt: looked away. Because there is still plenty in my mind-stream that would elicit shame if it weren’t held properly.

I also saw, unmistakably, that I’ll be back in that place one day, facing no one but myself. It’s not a process that unfolds in time, so in a sense, that “one day” is already here and now. If I want to know how I’ll fare when “judgment day” comes, all I have to do is face myself with full honesty right now. Which is all too easy to avoid when my belly is full and the sun’s shining on my face. All the ways I distract myself are ways of avoiding that.

I can’t imagine that a framework like this one will ever be popular with the masses, even if it turns out to be “true” (whatever that even means). But I do believe that certain aspects of it, most importantly the universality of Good and the recognition of evil as its absence, will be necessary for our species to make progress toward the kind of world many of us long for. Whether that best comes from religion, spirituality, science, or some mix I cannot say. But I hope it comes soon—and I find that the more firmly I orient toward the Light myself, the more real that possibility looks.

It is my intention to always stay oriented. I hope you will hold my feet to the fire when I drift.