Half-way In, Half-way Out
The thing about “waking up” (becoming conscious) to the world around us is that we can’t seem to do it just half way. Or at least I haven’t figured out how. Being awake to the reality of this world as best as we can understand it is like being “a little pregnant”. What I mean by comparing waking up just a little bit vs. being just a little bit pregnant, is that if you define pregnancy from the moment the sperm hits the ovum and a zygote is created to waking up a little bit when the spark of awareness inside of you opens your perception up to just how much is going on in this world, you’re either in or you’re out---there’s no half-way about it. Upon waking up, some of us spend our whole lives desiring to learn as much as we can about ourselves and the world around us. And there are also those of us who think they might avert fear of the unknown if they could just go back to being comfortably numb (thank you Pink).
The thing is once we’re awakened, we can’t ever really go back to being in that deep sleep of not-knowing again.
When I was in my early twenties I took a large amount of homemade LSD for the third (and last) time in my life. I was quite unprepared for the resulting unravelling of defense, thoughts and feelings as a result. Rather than preparing myself in a proper way prior to taking LSD as some friends would have done before they tripped, I did not make sure that I had rested and slept the night before (I’d actually eaten some mushrooms 24 hours prior), I did not eat good nourishing food and I had not designated a safe place to trip much less assign a “guide” who was not tripping themselves. So, as things were primed to do, when at the peak of my high it was time for a male friend I’d been in denial about desiring as more than a friend had to leave which meant he had to take us all back into the city so that he could take his estranged wife from home to work, I went into an immediate fight or flight mode. On our way back, as our car began its descent down a large hill, I began to relive a horrible car wreck I’d been in fours years prior. My skin turned clammy and grey and my body temperature dropped suddenly. I knew this was going to be a really bad trip. Once my friend dropped me and my two tripping friends off at our house, my mission was to find a way to make the thinking, fear and awareness crowding every corner of my brain to S T O P. I hoped that by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head that I could just sleep it off. But that wasn’t the case, the LSD had other plans and so for the next 24 hours I had to weather the way my brain exploded with fear, questions, philosophizing, theorizing, denying etc. I was scared to death and it was in the middle of all of this that I realized that the only person who could save me on the brink of insanity, was me. The good news; however, was that so many my walls of my denial were crumbling. The gig was up. Desperate to find help, I queried several friends I trusted for names of therapists, interviewed several and found one who could help me to crawl back to sanity. Through that process I learned that I suffered with anxiety and panic disorder. It was her thought also that the LSD had stripped most if not all of the filters in my brain. I was in individual therapy for several years. It was a painful but oddly relieving process where discovered who I was, how my upbringing, environment and genetics had influenced and effected me and my response and reactions to life as a result.
In this discovery process, I learned about the concept of choice---when I was at choice as to how I responded and what I was at choice about.
This LSD tripping gone awry is an extreme example of how I “woke up” which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy! This is just one reason why I believe we humans can’t just wake up half-way. Oh of course I could have made the choice to never get into counseling but then I may not have ever found out about12-step recovery programs or any of the other myriad of spiritual explorations that have helped me through this waking up process.
My fighter pilot Dad used to constantly say to me, “shit or get off the pot!” It’s a rather indelicate way of saying in six words what I just said in 700 but you get my drift.
Instead of waiting for some earth shattering, wall crumbling event to happen to us, isn’t it much kinder for us to welcome the birth of realization of who we’ve been carrying around inside of us our whole lives? Breathe, just breathe, there are so many paths and doors just waiting for us to take and open.