orgasmic existentialism
It was June 2020 and I was sitting in my living room for my first 5-MeO-DMT ceremony. This substance, which is found in a variety of plants and extracted from the Sonoran Desert Toad, is an entheogen, meaning it offers an experience of non duality. It is my belief that this state of oneness is what we come from and return to outside of our human lives as an individual consciousness. Touching this spiritual place was the most profound experience of my life. That peak is only a part of the whole experience. I got to see what I had to let go of on the way there and what I chose to pick up on the way back.
While I won't go into detail about the full experience, everyone's expression of it is different and mine involved a lot of movement and talking. While I was at the apex of the experience, completely lost in what is called the 'godhead' I moved my hand in front of me in a scooping motion towards me, recreating the loop of energy I was feeling. Everything in existence was being pulled into a vortex then pushed out again, creation and destruction in constant motion, the cycle of life.
In this ceremony I felt how hard it was for me to let go. I pleaded with myself as I looped back to full consciousness on my living room floor, "please let go, please let go." I was gripping so tightly to an identity, a life plan, an image I cultivated, always hedging my bets on how much I could do or be before I would have revealed too much. I, like many of us, was living a double life. The parts of myself that I worked to cultivate, and the parts I was ashamed of that I wanted to keep hidden from all except my most intimate connections. The things I wanted to want and the things I actually wanted. Who I wanted to be and who I really was.
After this ceremony, after I felt the undeniable rumblings of a self I had kept hidden and buried, I felt the distance between that self and the one I envisioned myself as, the difference between that and the one I showed to the world. I wondered what the fuck I was doing. I was so far from my high school self, the one who sought to express herself authentically, yet reticently. The one who didn't want anyone to push her one inch from the truth of herself.
After adolescence I found I could easily distract the easily distractible with a flirtation or storm of rhetoric. I would give people a light, catlike batting about. I could be charming, intelligent, inquisitive, and interesting, as if I was jiggling the linguistic keys for the current conversational companion, saying, "look over here, look over here, ignore the real girl behind the curtain, keep your focus over here.” Reliably, people, especially men, bought it. Reliably, I was bored and disappointed behind my facade.
So, here we are at 36: me, two roommates, and a shaman in my living room and I'm realizing that authentic, honest, earnest me is a liar, a fake, and a phony- all the things I said I wasn't. I was revealing just enough to be revealing. I showed enough to dip my toe in the pool of authenticity, but still look good. I realized I wasn't not who I thought I was or who I was pretending to be. If that was true, who is this person that I am protecting the image of by being less than myself?
We move through society as several people. Who we are to our acquaintances, our close friends, our inner narrative, as bold as it goes on a given day, and then the amorphous swirl that we accept or deny depending on how desperate or uncomfortable its current message is. If we were all running around with multiple shields in front of ourselves, acting like those facades are the truth of who we are, why do we also feel stuck or suffocated or afraid or not good enough? Is my purpose on this earth to polish my mask so everyone will see how shiny I am and be envious? Absolutely not.
This nine minute recording is the most humiliatingly vulnerable piece of art I could hope to create. I love it and I hate it. I’m fascinated and embarrassed by it. It’s spiritual, philosophical, and intensely human. It’s raw and honest and real. On the morning after my second ceremony in September of 2020 I had a reactivation in my car on the way to work. Instead of blocking what was coming out of me because it was strange and scary, I recorded it.
What I said here has guided my life ever since. There are lines I hear in my head as I move through the world. Instead of judging myself for having judgement I can sit apart from it with curiosity and with fascination ask myself to “tell me what it’s like."
Tell me about what it’s like to have conditioning, tell me about it. I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed as a spritual person, I’m ashamed of my thoughts, of my judgements, of my limiting beliefs. I’m so ashamed to be a person with judgements and thoughts and limiting beliefs. I am so ashamed to be a person. I’m so ashamed to be a person! I’m here to be a person and I’m so ashamed to be a person, I’m so fucking ashamed. I am so ashamed and I judge myself, I judge myself for these thoughts. I tell myself “if you were a spiritual person you wouldn’t have these thoughts.” No, I am here. I am here as a human being to experience being a human being. I am here to experience being ashamed at being a human being. I am here to experience conditioning, I’m here to experience it. I’m here to experience being a being who experiences conditioning.
I am here to feel what it feels like to feel separate, to feel judgment, to feel judged, to feel ashamed at being seen, to feel afraid of being seen. I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid of being seen. I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed of making mistakes. I’m a human being and I’m here and I make mistakes and I have judgement and I’m so ashamed about it. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed to be a human being, I’m so fucking ashamed to be a human being.
Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Tell me about what it’s like. I am the universe and I want to experience what its like to be here. I want to experience what it’s like to have conditioning. I want to experience what it’s like to be the universe experiencing being a human being with conditioning and experience it and to feel ashamed. To feel ashamed at having awareness of something that is so natural. And I want to feel what it’s like to judge myself. And I want to feel what it’s like to judge others. And I want to see it. And I want to see it. And I want to see that everything I tell you is me. All the good that I see in you is also me. And all the flaws I see in you, I have those flaws.
We are all here being human beings and I’m so ashamed of it. Ah god it just feels so good. It feels so good to be honest. It feels so good to be honest about how ashamed I am of existing. It feels so good. This is it. This is it. This is what it feels like. Ah this is what it feels like to be alive. This is what it feels like to be alive and to be ashamed of being alive. This is what I read in Nausea. This is what I read when I was so young. To be aware. To be aware of existing. Oh to be aware of it and it feels disgusting. It feels gloriously disgusting. It’s disgusting to be alive. It’s so disgusting, it’s so disgusting, it’s shameful and embarrassing. God, it feels so good, it feels os good to admit how disgusting it feels.
Can we all just agree it’s terrifying and disgusting. Oh god it feels so gross. It feels so gross. It feels beautifully gross. And it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying that it’s so infinite. I can make any choice. I can make any choice. I can make any choice. I can make any choice. I can make any choice in any moment. Oh god, how glorious would that be? How glorious would that be? How glorious would it be to make any choice? How glorious would it be for me to be honest about how ashamed I feel of existing and for other people to see it. That feels so embarrassing. That feels so embarrassing and freeing. I just want everyone to see me being so embarrassed to exist. I want you to look at me. I want you to look at me existing and being so horrified of it.
That is, that is it. Oh god this feels so good. It feels so good, it feels so vulnerable. It feels so alive, it feels so alive to admit this. It feels so alive. I want to be alive. I want to be alive in each moment, I want to be honest. I want to be honest about the truth of existing. I want to say it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, but it’s also everything. It is ugly and it is gross and it is terrifying and this is to exist.
This is to exist. Not to sit here and tell myself how pretty it should look and how pretty I am. It’s not to sit here and do it right for you or do it right for me. It’s to sit here and just gloriously exist in all of it’s humiliation. In all of it’s humiliation I want to be seen. I want to be seen. I want to be seen. I want to be seen. I want to be seen. I want to be seen and it’s so ugly. It’s so ugly. I want everyone to see how ugly I am. I go around trying to pretend to look good. I want everyone to see how ugly I am. This was my poem. This was my poem. I don’t want to be pretty anymore. I want to be real. I just want to exist and I want everyone to look at me and be horrified because they look at me and see how ugly existing is and they are horrified and it’s the most beautiful thing. It’s the most beautiful thing how horrifically ugly it is and how ugly I am and how vulnerable I am.
Oh my god. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. Please, see me. See me. See how ugly and horrifying and ugly and terrifying. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want you to watch me. I want you to watch me not know what I’m doing. I want you to watch me create what I’m doing. I want you to watch me not knowing what I’m doing and then become from this, from this, from this, from this place, from this place I’m free. From this place I’m free to become. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m doing it wrong all the time and I want you to see me. I want you to see me not know what I’m doing. I want you to see me. I want you to see me not knowing what I’m doing and I want to create in front of you. I want you to see me and I want you to see that in this moment, oh in this moment, we can be anything.
We can be anything once we are who we are. Once we are who we are, but we don’t want to be ugly so we are not who we are. We don’t want to be ugly, we don’t want to be ugly so we are missing it. We're missing it. We’re missing the place that is creation, that is beauty, I want to share this with you because this is what we want. We want to be seen in this infinite ugliness of existing. Oh god, oh god, it feels so good, it feels so good. Oh god, Oh it feels so good, oh that’s beautiful, oh that’s beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you to myself. Thank you, this is so beautiful. Tell me what it’s like, tell me what it’s like. Thank you.