#but said belief and the ego she's built around that truly conflicts with the world she says she wishes for

[blitz0hno]

There's incredible fear of people and all the facades they put up behind Kotoko's malice it's incredibly sad and worth noting the prison system does indeed reinforce to her the Violence is The Answer

[waterrunstogether]

Rites of Passage in the Fifth World

I’ve been thinking lately about the absence of real rites of passage in modern “western culture”. A rite of passage is a sort of ritualized event (that may or may not be endorsed/organized by a community) in which a person is believed to exit from one stage of life and enter the next, usually from childhood to adulthood. Other than the humiliation of high school proms/frat hazing, or getting your driver’s license, or turning 21 and getting shitfaced, my culture in the United States has little to offer in the way of true rites of passage. 

The result is a population of confused, somewhat disillusioned children driving around and going to work or university and pretending to be adults while hopelessly stuck in the liminal space between youth and adulthood.

~ 20 year old me pretending to know what’s going on ~

I have thought about quinceañeras and baptisms, religious rites of passage commonly practiced still, but considering the traumatic experience that my parents’ organized religion was for me, I don’t believe now that my baptism was a helpful event facilitating my transition into maturity. I think it was a blindingly painful event whose toxicity I needed to overcome in what I now believe was the true rite of passage. 

I first dropped acid when I was traveling in Bulgaria. My partner was in her hometown across the country and I was visiting Plovdiv with a friend. We had just finished traveling the world, or at least Eurasia, meeting new faces and trying new things and taking wild risks in Thailand and Turkey and India and Malaysia, to name a few. I had also just escaped the cult I was born and raised in which had hammered into me from birth that my sexual and romantic orientation was an abomination, as a woman I was to obey men, God loved me and wanted me to fear him (that is to say, love = fear), the leaders of the church were to be obeyed and respected all the time (even if they were obviously wrong) and so on and so forth. It was an insane transition between being trapped in these religious handcuffs and learning that I could break free all along. In fact, I carried so much self hatred and internalized homophobia with me into my supposed new life that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Despite being outwardly happier than I had ever been before with a wonderful partner and community who truly loved and supported me for who I was, inwardly I was constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown due to all of the conflicting thoughts and beliefs I was carrying and creating within myself.

The experience of that first trip was an interesting one. Every step of the way my body seemed to pull me towards the letting go of all of the toxicity that was so thick and had built up like plaque in the arteries of my energetic being--yet, I remained me throughout the trip, at the end feeling somewhat empowered but not yet finished with the transformation.

A few months later I took psilocybin, AKA magic mushrooms, with my little brother on a rainy Summer day in D.C. The whole come up of the trip was talking to trees and observing the movements of leaves, running my fingers over the moss growing on the exposed, knotty roots of tree in front of our house. But at the end of the trip, something changed. Once again my body requested, begged me, to let go of the still-prevalent toxicity inside of me. My health was in rough shape, mentally and physically, and my body knew the culprit. But once more I felt I couldn’t let go just yet, it would be too much for me, I wasn’t ready. So I spent the entire come down and then some, maybe four hours, weeping uncontrollably on the basement floor.

The second time I dropped acid was yesterday, with my partner, here in Berlin. It changed everything.

During the come up I was taken aback by how strong the effect it had on me was. My partner, bless her heart, had taken a larger dose than me, yet felt no effect the entire time. Her tolerance has always been naturally higher than mine for every kind of intoxicating substance, and LSD was no exception. 

As time went on I came to realize that her high tolerance was incredibly fortunate for me and my trip. The initial come up was amusing, as flashes of white light began to fill up my eyes, closed and open; but very quickly I began to get paranoid, strange little thoughts about being set up and targeted running through my mind as my sense of self slowly began to dissipate, just nonsense that the ego conjures up to protect itself. But my partner’s calming reassurances that she loved me and that I was safe effectively calmed me down.

Once I began to enjoy the ride up, holding a half of a pomegranate and appreciating its beauty, touching a slice of orange and loving how soft it felt in my hands, admiring the fractals of color creating all kinds of geometric shapes on the walls and snow outside the window, I became comfortable with my loss of identity. At some point I realized that I didn’t even know my name, and I didn’t care, because it was irrelevant. All that was relevant was experience. 

Imagine experiencing and interacting with the world around you without the barrier of the thing that we are so used to that it’s difficult to think of it as a barrier at all: your concept of self. Ideas about names and races and gender and desire and anger and malice and hatred just made absolutely no sense whatsoever. In this state, all that made sense was goodness and beauty and love. All that I understood was harmony and mutually beneficial behavior. My preconceived notions about who I was and what that meant were being shattered and shredded before my very eyes, exposed for what they were: nonsense.

Once I plateaued and began to slowly come down after about four or five hours I was able to contemplate what these things meant, what they would mean for me going forward. I went into the bathroom around hour 7 and decided that it was time to look into the mirror.

Many people will tell you not to look into the mirror during an acid trip, that it’ll give you the dreaded “bad trip” and you’ll have a shit time. I completely disagree. If you are like me and need to come to terms with yourself through the wonderful, horrific, beautiful, terrifying experience that is an “ego death”, I’m afraid that you’ll have no choice but to look into the mirror at some point. 

So, I stared myself down in the mirror and admitted what I couldn’t admit for so long, due to being taught that I was essentially evil since the day I was born. I’d called myself a sinner, wicked, worthless, ugly, an abomination and just about every other mean word in the evangelical dictionary. But as I stood there looking at my body in the mirror, egoless and impartial, I said, “You have done and thought some cruel things to yourself for some time now. But you know what? You are a kind person. You are a wonderful person. You treat people with respect and love, you treat everyone you’ve ever met with so much empathy, so much caring. You love the truth, you love to be generous, you love to be a good friend. You must begin to treat yourself the same way. I know you’ve had so much hatred in your heart contaminating your energy for so long, but that is enough. That is enough. No more. I am a kind person. I am a kind person. I love you. Remember that night so long ago? Beneath the stars, where they submerged you in the baptismal water and tried to destroy you, saying these sacred waters would wash all your sins away, along with your fragile, meaningless identity? Well, they simply added more to your ego, a darker side. You built up so much negativity for so long. Well, look at you now. Your identity, all of the ideas and concepts that you’ve built up around who you really are to protect you from the hurt of Life, it’s all gone. Now you’re going to baptize yourself again. You’ll be truly reborn, this time dedicated not to destroying yourself for the sake of a religion, but dedicated to renewing and becoming and becoming and becoming.” As I looking into the mirror my silhouette became filled in with the velvet black of the night sky, full of bright stars.

I turned on the water and was baptized once again, by my own hands.

When I returned to the room I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life, light as air, free. I told several people about how much I love them and described my love for them in detail, not as this thing that’s an extension of my own ego, but my love for them was a little bit of energy that I had the honor of holding in me, in this body, and sharing between us for a time, for the wonderful events that we call our lives. I could actually see love. I understood that I was not all of the concepts I’ve built around myself, but an expression of energy in this space and time, connected to every other expression of energy in all of history, from the beginning and until the end. My matter, my body, was simply a vehicle for the energy, and would be recycled into new vehicles after I die. My energy would be transferred into new vehicles as well. That’s what we perceive as death: just a simple transfer of energy and recycling of matter. My ego would not live on, thankfully. My consciousness as conflated with ego would cease to exist with me. But the underlying animating force behind all things in the universe, the true source of consciousness, would never be destroyed or created, simply recycled again and again and again and again. Becoming and becoming and becoming and becoming.

The hilarious and bizarre world of reality is hilarious and bizarre. It’s so beautiful and mystical and wonderful and honestly, nothing I write here could ever explain how I experienced being alive in that sixteen hour trip. Words don’t convey it, words can’t convey it. Reality is visceral, experiential, impartial and impossible to quantify in something as crude as human language. 

All I know is that, today, I am a fundamentally changed person. I’d feared ego death for so long, feared that it would be too much, too painful. And it was so, so painful--but it was so worth it. I am happy and proud to exist, grateful for everything I have accomplished and can accomplish in this miraculous, tiny little vessel during this ephemeral event that is my life. I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow if tomorrow exists, and unleash all of my love on everyone who’ll have it. Love is the energy that unites us with our own bodies and the entire world around us. How lucky and strange it is to be anything at all.

May you have a peaceful day. The universe smiles upon you.