Spiritual
Getting to the truth. Spirituality. The breakout archetype.
At the end of all my essays are songs that I enjoy.
It’s 12:13 am Christmas morning at a hostel in Peru. I had a nice Christmas dinner fellow travelers. I ate rice pudding, arroz con leche, as they call it here. My stomach was hurting post-meal, so it goes, but I wrote this story and now I’m good. This essay touches on spiritual enlightenment, psychedelics, my favorite book, trying to be less wrong, Elon Musk, and the breakout archetype.
Before dinner, I was sitting on the porch of the hostel with Arlene, from Luxembourg, and Jon, from The Netherlands, does any other country start with “The”?
Arlene and Jon have both done plant ceremonies. They drank Ayahuasca, a South American concoction that has DMT in it. As usual, people who have done a plant ceremony are asking me if I’m interested in doing a plant ceremony. It’s spiritual, they say.
“What does the word spiritual mean?” I ask.
“Wow, that’s a big one,” says Jon. “Like asking what is god.”
“There’s no wrong answer,” I say. “What does it mean to you.”
“It refers to like, my spirit,” he says, and does a hand motion down the center of his body.
I consider asking him to define it without the word in the definition.
“I will answer my own question,” I say. Arlene smiles.
“Spiritual means, to me,” I get the feeling this going to be a profound moment for them, “re-drawing, or erasing, the lines of separateness.”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Can you repeat that?” says Arlene.
“Re-drawing or erasing the lines of separateness.”
“And is that something you came up with?”
“Well, I was reading a book by Jed McKenna,”
“They have a Jed McKenna book here,” Jon says, excited.
“Oh, nice. Jed wrote that spiritual refers to the sense of self, and enlightenment means truth, so spiritual enlightenment is truth about the self. Anyway, I was having conversations and writing about this topic, and that definition of what is spiritual came up. Maybe I came up with it, but I don’t claim credit.”
Just then, a couple from Los Angeles arrived at the hostel. Over dinner, they told us horrifying stories about the multi-day plant ceremony they just finished. They drank a bunch of Ayahuasca.
“We highly recommend our Shaman,” the woman said.
“The first day I was a wreck,” the man said.
They talk about the amount of vomiting, which they call purging.
“Even though it’s healing, it’s exhausting,” said Jon.
“Peruvians don’t do this,” says the Peruvian who manages the hostel. “They think it’s weird. I’ve heard many stories about the ayahuasca ceremonies. Mostly horror stories. So I have never done it.”
“If you ever want to do it we highly recommend our Shaman,” says the LA woman.
The Peruvian nods.
“He’s level 8 out of 9,” says the LA man.
I start collecting empty plates and break out the arroz con leche.
Rather than ayahuasca, I think I’ll go on a walk and read a book, then do some writing and eat some late-night snack foods, arroz con leche, probably, considering the LA people aren’t eating any of it.
I go to the bookshelf to look for Jed McKenna. I can’t find him. Perhaps someone beat me to it. The next day I find Jed McKenna in the cabinet upstairs. It’s one of my favorite books, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment. This is not a popular book, so I’m surprised it’s here at a hostel in Peru.
Jed’s message on spiritual enlightenment is this: Try to write what’s true until you do.
“In Damndest, I introduced the process of Spiritual Autolysis, which is really nothing more than a kind of journaling on steroids designed to help us burn through the seemingly endless layers of ego and delusion in the quickest and least painful manner. Try to write something true and keep at it until you do; that's the match that becomes the blaze.”
Jed
The idea is to write away all the bullshit so that only truth remains. The idea is to think away the perception of separateness. Since you won’t be the same at the end, seeing it through is a kamikaze mission.
Never in my life have I questioned the value of knowing truth, or at least unknowing the false. I was born with an allergy to bullshit. On the spectrum of truth to untruth, truth has more predictive power. On the spectrum of total-bullshit to maps-well-to-reality, the latter is useful. Truth is relevant for trying to be useful. Truth is irrelevant if you’re not trying to do something. There’s a lot of illusion to unlearn if you’d like…Narratives, separateness, birth and death, good and bad, success and failure, duality in general.
The challenge isn’t repeating these words on a conceptual level, the challenge is unknowing the scripts based on falseness that run our lives. With neutrality comes freedom. All that’s left is preferences.
A starting point for trying to write what is true is the question: Who am I?
I tried to answer this question for a college class called “Metaphysics Writing”. The essay prompt was what constitutes personal identity? Students were presented with two options. We could support a philosopher who said the answer is memories, or one who said it’s “continuity of consciousness.” I didn’t know. I went to YouTube. Alan Watts presented me with the idea that the universe is one thing and personal identity is a dream. I ran a thought experiment. If I could see at the atomic level, and I could not see colors, I suppose it would be obvious that the universe is a continuous ocean of energy. So that’s what I wrote. I got a B+.
Shortly after writing my personal identity is bullshit essay, I grew mushrooms. In school I was told that mushrooms are “hallucinogenics.” But my experience with light doses of psilocybin mushrooms was that I felt like I was hallucinating less while on mushrooms than when I was sober. I felt like I was seeing with less fog on the lens. This reaffirmed for me, experientially, that what is called reality is the consensus hallucination.
My experience with heavier doses of psychedelics is that it shakes the snow globe. Ayahuasca makes people vomit and then creates an altered state of consciousness that is highly suggestible. Perhaps a temporary side effect is seeing truth, or what feels like closer to truth; however, I don’t think the way to minimize falseness is a weekend full of altered states of consciousness.
A plant ceremony could make someone double down on an illusion or switch out their illusions, perhaps ending up in the astrology space. Even if the altered state of consciousness momentarily allows a person to experience truth, it skips the part where they unlearn all the bullshit.
Trying to write what’s true means writing a lot of falseness. Purging, as the plant people might call it. The march toward truth is a marathon of de-programming. A march toward zero. Zero fog on the lens. But the lens is always there, so perhaps all we can say for certain is, “I am that I am.”
Enlightenment is detaching from make-believe pretend stuff. It’s a process of falsifying hypotheses, which is also the scientific method. In the 1700s and 1800s, falsifying hypotheses went mainstream. It’s called “The Enlightenment” period.
The overlap of Jed McKenna and Elon Musk is a physics mindset: always trying to be less wrong, less false.
“Basically,” Elon said, “you should take the approach that you’re wrong. That you, the entrepreneur, are wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” On another occasion, he said, “I take the position that I’m always to some degree wrong, and the aspiration is to be less wrong.” … “It’s a little bit tougher on the ego, but it’s great for getting to the truth of things.”
During an interview at TED, Elon said, “I was just absolutely obsessed with truth. Just obsessed with truth. And so, the obsession with truth is why I studied physics, because physics attempts to understand the truth of the universe. Physics is just what are the provable truths of the universe, and truths that have predictive power. Physics was a very natural thing for me to study. It was intrinsically interesting to understand the nature of the universe.”
Trying to write what is true is a process of erasing the bullshit off the mental map. The map of the terrain answers the question what to do. When figuring out what to do, minimize falseness. Try to work off something true.
Falseness works to create a narrative that the psyche craves. A simple map that answers what to do—even if it’s total bullshit.
Spiritual awakening is about discovering what’s true. Anything that’s not about getting to the truth must be discarded. Truth isn’t about knowing things, you already know too much. It’s about unknowing. It’s not about becoming true. It’s about unbecoming false. So that all that’s left is truth.
If you want to be a priest, or a llama, or a rabbi or a theologian, then there’s a lot to learn, tons and tons, but if you want to figure out what’s true, then it’s a whole different process, and the last thing you need is more knowledge.
Jed
To summarize, Jed says that if a spiritual kamikaze vomits falseness in the form of writing for long enough then eventually they will be left with truth, because there is only so much untruth to vomit. It could take a few years.
Our sets of hands all come from the same body, and we’re all painting the same canvas. But for pragmatic reasons, we pretend we are separate artists painting on separate canvases. It’s hard to comprehend the vast pragmatic value of ego, the illusion of separate individuals. Our entire economic system, and thus our civilization, runs on the abstraction of the individual. I can’t think of another way to do it. The lines of separateness need to be drawn somewhere. In theory, the lines of separateness change when people get married. I think they change the most when people become parents. I imagine that then it is experientially obvious that you are not your body, unless you insist that you are.
Unlearning the false and seeing the world how it really is, day after day, is an accomplishment in the league of learning how to fly. It’s a multi-year, perhaps never-ending process of unlearning bullshit. A yucky slog of removing all the junk that your snowball picked up as it rolled through life.
Right now, you are reading the product of a try-to-write-something-true process.
I do it for fun and also because I can’t not. It’s just what I do.
My friend
writes too. Paul writes and talks about breaking out of bullshit narratives. To me, the pathless path is throwing out the bullshit map and bullshit scripts, and thinking for yourself.The first question Paul asks podcast guests is, what are the invisible scripts that ran your life? It’s easier to see them in hindsight than to see the ones operating right now.
Paul is an example of the little-known breakout archetype, described by Jed McKenna in Incorrect Enlightenment, and characterized by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, the story of a kamikaze mission.
My favorite kind.
Elon also embodies the breakout archetype. He is trying to break out of Earth’s gravity well. He is trying to make life multi-planetary. He is trying to merge biological and digital intelligence. These are kamikaze missions because on the other side, the you will not be the same you as before.
Thanks for reading this messy work of thoughts. Song links below. I don’t know how many people give a shit about this spiritual truth stuff. Generally, people want to hear about sex, money, and politics. Also violence and “mental health.” How’s that sound? Let me know in the comments what you want me to write about.
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