Oh, that's something I fudged a bit on the site. It was just too hard to talk about publicly, after steeping for so many years in a atheistic, nihilistic, fundamental-rationalist punk rock mindset.
Let's start with California, where I had my mystical experience. It was one of the handful of times in my life I've done acid. I tried to make it subtly obvious with the section title to those who would know ("California Tripping"). A lot of people tend to scorn drug-induced mystical experiences and such, but I don't. (Check out this interesting study from John Hopkins:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2006/07_11_06.html)
Anyway. We were peaking as we walked out toward the point, a 5 mile hike along some of the most stimulating scenery I have ever seen. Somewhere along the way, getting to the endmost point became a "pilgrimage" and the experience took on mounting spiritual significance as the drug and our set and setting conspired to awe the living **** out of us and make me see god.
Not the usual American 'God,' but the faceless Eastern everything and everywhere root-of-all-being god. The sun was beginning to set over the ocean as we walked back, and I found I could stare directly into it for as long as I wanted to.* I also smoked a bowl of lichens from a tree. You know how it is, maybe. Hopefully. (The things that you get up to while tripping, that is, not the lichen smoking specifically.)
Hmm, those are things I did, not things I thought, which I wanted to try to remember and talk about. Argh, this is impossible and ridiculous (see: "ineffable").
OK, I saw that everything was so deeply and complexly and inextricably interconnected that everything everywhere and when was literally one. And that 'everything was OK' – I imagine you can see why I didn't go into this stuff on the website – that there was nothing worth stressing over, that I could create the reality I wanted to live in, that I have the ability to do anything I choose to do. That it was OK to leave behind my ideas about who I'd thought I Really Was and Would Always Be as a boy and as a punk, that there was no reason to feel conflicted about working to succeed at a job or buying a house or maybe someday getting married or settling down to raise kids. And also that there was no reason to be worried if I didn't actually wind up doing any of those things, or even if I did go back to feeling conflicted or stressed about any of it – that even feeling miserable sometimes or not achieving or fleeing from or chasing illusions were OK, too. I knew this wasn't a perspective I'd ever be able to fully hold onto, and as I babbled happily to Jacque, I repeatedly mentioned this – none of this will really make sense later, or feel true even though it is true, but that's OK too …"
Right now I don't really remember much of the rest of it, but suffice to say it was more of the above 'totally hippie' ****, that I still have a hard time writing about - it makes me feel vulnerable, I guess. But keep in mind, as I will try to do – this story leads directly to me finding those teapots, and those teapots are friggin Weird, drugs or not.
So.
We had just gotten back to the car as the sun went completely beneath the low Pacific horizon. We were still tripping, but post-peak I am always more, and not less, able to navigate reality effectively (versus when I'm sober). So I opted to drive us back into town. The road from Point Reyes back to the highway was an archetypical dark and winding road, twisting like a worm as it dodged through a primeval redwood forest.
I put the Devo song "That's Good" on repeat on the rental car's stereo and wove through the looming trees and thick darkness at a speed that had Jacque silently fighting terror but which felt perfectly sedate to me, so confident was I in my ability to intuitively 'navigate reality.' I know I was going faster than I would have even gone normally, and I know it was my very confidence in my ability to do so that made it possible – just as my lack of confidence in such manuevering while not under the influence of LSD would have sent me hurtling off the road.
Once we emerged from the forest and reentered the fringes of civilization, it became clear that the trip's influence had also changed my navigational habits – I didn't check a map once, never doubting my "subconscious" or intuition's ability to bring me where I wanted to go.
We flew through the backroads to the country roads to the major highway heading south toward San Francisco glowing from the other side of the Golden Gate bridge, still tripping, but no longer listening to Devo on repeat.
When we got to the tollbooths at the fringes of the city, I blew straight through the open lanes, which legally required a remotely-scannable pass that I of course did not have. In the state of mind I was in, it was hard to care even a little bit about such formalities.
(Unfortunately, they can figure out who was driving a rental car and mail you a ticket. Fortunately, San Francisco is a city with very progressive and reasonable fines.)
The next morning I was no longer tripping, but was still very much feeling the aftereffects of my shifts in perception. I felt good. Really good. Nothing could bother me, and I was able to navigate the end of the vacation – the first one I'd ever really planned and executed by myself – without a hitch – hotel checkout, final trips around town, rental car return, bus ride, return flight – no worries, no problems, and still feeling pretty amazingly connected and in tune with the universe.
My memory gets a little fuzzy after the return home – I know the thrift store trip (when I bought the first teapot) was within a week of my return, and that in that time I was still in the mystical afterglow – but that it was fading, and the raging skeptic in me was demanding a recount with increasing fervor.
How the hell could intuition be trusted, when its voice was so easily imitated by ego and paranoia? How could I justify taking on a belief system that was essentially magical and faith-based? Wasn't my experience explained most simply by wishful thinking and drugs in the sunshine?
When we went to the thrift store that weekend, I was still trying to live by intuition, but my abilities to do so were fading as the power of my convictions did. I wasn't using creative license in the website story when I described that part – I really was drawn to the teapot weirdly, I really did struggle with my desire to buy it, I really did decide to do so explictly because of the 'take away' lessons from my acid trip, and I did actually say aloud "I just feel like I want this in my house." The discovery of the twin teapot, the day I bought the house, went down exactly as described, except for the part I already explained, about how I wasn't immediately awestruck, and tried rationalizing the coincidence away until I couldn't do it anymore (which might have been later that night or even the next day, I don't actually recall – see a future post about my utterly terrible memory, if I remember to write it).
The final place I fudged in the teapot tale was about the Aftermath. I said I didn't think I could know what the teapots meant. Well, rationally, intellectually, that was true.
But I'm living in a post-teapots reality now, and I'm finding that there are other kinds of Truth than the things you can prove logically. That there are "reasons that reason never knows," as Pascal or some other theologian guy said.
I think I do know why the teapots happened, but it's irrational and insane.
The teapots happened because I wanted to know if I could follow my intuition – is the universe really interconnected or alive in ways that made walking by faith not only possible, but even ... paradoxically ... rational?
Are the boundaries between self and reality, mind and matter, fuzzy enough? Is the universe insanely complex enough? Enough that even if totally materialist and causal, it's nonetheless indistinguishable, from our human perspectives, from magic?
In a nutshell, I was asking if I should Believe in Magic.
And the goddamn universe said "Yes."
