How Old Are You, Really?

This is an obvious thought, and yet a startling one: the stuff of the universe has been here all along, no subtractions, no additions, just evolving into greater and greater complexity. The stuff of my body, which used to be the stuff of my mother’s body, which used to be the animals and plants that she ate, which, going back, used to be, as they said in the sixties, stardust, which itself used to be the elements that formed those stars, originally came from a mixture of the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, created in the first minutes of the big bang. The matter that composes my 13.7 billion year old body has gone through more changes than most matter, while the self-awareness of this body is a novel level of all this evolving.

 We, in this brief moment, are the living front of all this, and a fairly special front we are too, since we are able to consciously partake in, perhaps even help design, what comes next. And it turns out that the experiences of the mystics point the way forward in the next step of our journey, showing how we can summon ourselves from regular awareness to infusion with, for want of a better word, the divine. This self-awareness can help burn off the karma of all the cruelty, torment, tragedy, and closure that has preceded us, and with that same awareness we can open ourselves to the glories that lie ahead in what Teilhard de Chardin calls the Omega Point, the end point of a process in which the big bang was Alpha. In our own bodies, as de Chardin puts it, we are a more knowing part of, “the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing matter.”  

 When our suffering is suffered unknowingly, we quite rightly call for the pain killers, whether that is morphine or burying ourselves in our own small compulsions or our consumer heavens; when we suffer knowingly, we can burn off the karma and open to the divine, and with that the suffering can turn to exaltation. Psychedelics, by focusing the mind and by opening the mind to divinity, helps us turn our suffering to that exaltation. That is the role psychedelics may play in the world, as we accelerate from geological time frames to the time frame of the trip, which speeds and slows in alarming ways, and which also bends the mind in quite peculiar and original directions.

 Then why, if we struggle so in our ordinary lives to enter the magnificent forum of our evolutionary destiny, do we choose so often to doom scroll on our phone or watch a movie trailer rather than join the great enterprise? The astounding amount of time that we all simply waste. I think it just means that you and I, like the rest of heaving humanity, are not yet evolved to that state of being where we can fully inhabit ourselves. Collectively, we are like a person fitfully turning in their sleep in early morning, knowing in some far corner of their brain that there is something that needs to be done, somewhere to get up and go to, but quite what – can’t remember. We fight between the sleep we are in and the waking we aspire to. In this collective fitful slumber, we spend an uncomfortable amount of time in an earlier, more painful, stage of our evolving; but our personal struggle to awaken is not time wasted on trying to reach life’s starting line, it is the cutting edge of love and life’s evolving. When enough of us have struggled and stirred, our incoherent efforts may create a possibility for the following generations to blink, open their eyes and see the next tasks ahead. They may be the ones more magnetized towards the waking world, the glories of the Omega Point, where there will surely await new, and from where we stand now, quite inconceivable wakings to be done.