The Last Bastion of Life
This blog continues the integration of the second of three ayahuasca ceremonies on Jan 9, 2023. The first is The Essence of I.
Recently, my spiritual journey has oriented towards the unveiling what guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj called the “I Am”… the formless essence of me. I’ve been working on moving past frameworks or vocabulary, of religion or ideas, and penetrating deeper into the unfiltered core of what my life feels within me. Within my meditations and plant medicine ceremonies, I have been touching this place inside of me that feels like God: a vast stillness, powerful yet soft, that underlies all of my experience.
I often share a concept that “God” is a word. Words are frameworks that attempt to convey ideas. Words like “God” may engender many different ideas, but the ideas themselves attempt to convey feelings. The feeling of God is very similar for all: an ineffable connection with something infinitely powerful and deep. Ultimately, feelings convey energy. And the energy of God is the same for everyone.
In my first ceremony, I felt my Inner Power as energy. On my second ceremony, my intention was to surrender into greater purity of my essence. At every juncture where I would have a belief or an attachment, especially of an attachment to an idea or feeling of who I am, I worked on surrendering it. I kept letting go.
Spiritual teacher David Hawkins says that surrender is the letting go of aversion and attraction. It is letting go of the thing I don't want but also letting go of the things I do want. I felt such a revelation when I read this a few months ago. I finally had a compass to follow in my path of surrender. I could let go of “I don't want this fear”, but I would also get to surrender “I don't want this ease”.
As I kept meditating on my present experience under ayahuasca, I willfully surrendered each sensation or thought that came up. I was in a hamster wheel of persistently letting go until a point where I was looking at death. This was such an interesting experience: a place I have read about but never gotten to, myself.
I have experienced an ego death before in psychedelics, but each time previously felt aggressive and forced. I didn’t feel like I chose to experience dying; I felt like the psychedelic experience pushed me off a cliff. While those experiences were deeply transformative for me in ferrying me to a place of consciousness of greater fearlessness, I am realizing now that what I lacked was the agency and self-empowerment to have arrived there by spiritual will.
Within this ceremony, I slowed my breathing down and knew that I could slow my heart beat down. I knew I could will myself to die. I was surrendering and surrendering and finally arrived at a place where I could surrender my life. The experience of this was fascinating. I observed this potentiality and did not feel fear. Instead, I felt clarity: this is the void in which I am nothing, I am nobody, and it felt like infinite peace.
Then, there was a spark of worry… of doubt. If I were to die, would I really be gone? How would my wife lying next to me in her own experience feel if she were to wake to her husband with a still heart? How would my mom feel if her son was suddenly gone? How would the people in the room–whom I loved dearly–react to discover Austin whisked away from this world? I witnessed this morsel of fear and it was equally fascinating. I observed my own thoughts and feelings from a place of consciousness where I didn't feel the attraction or the aversion. I witnessed the fear without being the fear.
I realized that I didn't have to solve the problem right there. I allowed myself the grace to return to conscious awareness and smiled at my wife in the dark. David Hawkins shares that when he touched the Void on his path to Enlightenment, it was the love for his father that led him to return back to life. I saw how I arrived at an ultimate bastion of non-clarity: when I can finally surrender the fear of death, I can live life truly free.
