The three of us stood in a triangle on the roof, each of us completely out of our heads in our own particular way. But it was me and Eliot who had dropped the ketamine bomb on top of the weed and acid already pumping through our system. This was me at one of my most twisted – chemically, emotionally, psychologically. Something interesting or unusual or completely diabolical was bound to happen.

And something did. Suddenly I saw a rainbow, or more like a wave of tie-dyed pixelated pulses coming and going between me and Eliot. It was like I could grab them, control them, send them back and forth out from my thoughts. We were in lockstep, hearing – no, seeing – each other’s thoughts.

 Every verbal utterance, everything spoken, was a riddle, but not these pulses, these thoughts, these sensations. They were more real. I mean, I had no idea what I was saying, my mouth and words feeling like they weren’t even a part of me. But I could see the energy of the words travel out in front of me and could see the same from Eliot.

 Roxy just stood there watching, unable to see or enter into this connection, try as she would, her little attention-getting self mangled from exclusion. She’s the one who wouldn’t do any ketamine and now I could feel her angst at not being a part of our unseen world.

 Sitting and watching the people come in, greet Shaykh, say a few words, and leave, I began to notice something. One of the older men, a well-known elder of the community, would come in and sit off to the side, barely acknowledging Shaykh. It was strange to see his total neglect of the proper manners and etiquette in dealing with the shaykhs. The polite thing to do was greet him before anyone else in the room, as a show of respect. No one else seemed to notice his bad manners, especially not Shaykh, so I just observed. After sitting a while, he would just get up and leave, sometimes greeting someone he passed on the way out. Sometimes he would turn and add something to the ongoing conversation. But mostly he seemed to just sit.

 Gradually, I began to understand. Indeed, he most definitely greeted Shaykh when he came in and likely spoke more to him than anyone else in the room.

When you know who God is, when you know that he is the First – that he came before the Before, that he is the Last – that he will exist after the After, that he is the Seen – the material world and all its contents, that he is the Unseen – all that you cannot see; when you know that God is “closer to a human than his jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16), when you know that God knows all that you conceal and all that you reveal, the All-Knowing; you begin to understand how two people can communicate without a verbal utterance, how two people can operate through the reality that is God, what some might call the cosmic unity, universal reality, oneness of being.

They are able to communicate through the realization that I thought I saw back in those daze of ketamine and acid on the roof with Eliot and Roxy. Those chemicals only gave me an illusion, a glimpse, a simulation, of the possibilities of this space we call The Mind. How, when its walls are torn down, when notions of separation and identity are broken down, when the toxic sunspots of the heart are polished away so that it can glow, share and receive, anything is possible. The chemicals opened me, but they also left me exposed and that exposure allowed in all kinds of things, mostly bad; they left me broken and those breaks were fragments in opposition to the natural flow of the oneness of existence; they expanded me and that expansion was more than my measly mind was ready for, in its broken state.

The mind and the body. A duality in the western way of thinking. One and then the other. That’s what Descartes said anyway. Not the same but only divisible. Perhaps the greatest error in the history of western civilization, for out of that has come nothing but division - I think, therefore I am. My head and my body. What I need and what I want. Two different things. One and then the other. Separate but equal, perhaps.
First comes division within the human, chopping him up into a body and a mind, limbs and the head, then comes division between humans. I am my own person. I am an individual. I don’t let society or any other institution tell me what to do. I follow my own path. I know. I know myself. Give me my own house with a yard with which to protect myself from others. Give me a big car to drive with air conditioning so that I don’t have to open my windows to the world. Give me an answering machine so that I don’t have to respond to others.

Others. Those that are not us; those that are not like us.

Me and you. Us and them. My life and your life.

Everyone has heard that we only use 10% of our brain. What about that other 90%? How can that part be accessed? Through a real and genuine opening. Through a phenomenon like the Shaykh and the old man, through connection, through tapping into the reality of existence. Maybe its like that 10% is our Self while that other 90% is the world, only available when the walls of the Self are torn down. It is realizing that other people are as much a part of each of us as the sun and the moon, the stars and the sky, the oceans and the rain, the trees and the earth. The difference between us and these other things of course is our Mind, our consciousness, our awareness. Our blessing and our curse. Does it fight the powers or fall into place, following the laws of nature, just like the sun, the moon, the trees, and the oceans do.

A curse if we, as we have done ever since Descartes, use the Mind to build fortifications around our Self and our identify and our individualism; to harbor and protect. The yard around our house.

For only when lose our consciousness in the essence, when it melts into the Reality of existence, the truth of nonexistence do we really come alive.

“Man, I am out of my head! I just can’t work anything out,” I managed to mumble in the midst of the ketamine brain freeze.

“I think you guys have something to work out,” Roxy poked, trying to stoke up something, drama or tension, that wasn’t there. Eliot and I did not have a problem. She was the problem, the third element not caught up in the pixelated waves of the moment. Eliot and I were floating on the moment, drowning in ketamine and LSD mind decay, watching the world unfurl in neon pixels.

We were like the mind and the body, operating as one, in sync. Roxy was the heart – infected and diseased. The trinity was broken and thus, the buzz incomplete, as wild and exhilarating as it was, the toxic third element dragged me down into a wave of chemical waste.

Even now I am still recovering, working to mend the fragments, sew the broken pieces back into the fold of Oneness. This thing called the Mind, this thing we think we control and direct, really is out of our control, just as it was when it submitted to the whims of strong chemicals, just as it is in these perfect moments of flow, of being totally absorbed in the moment, when time seems to stop and the Mind shut off. These are flashes of the Reality, moments when the me, the mind, the we, the time have melted and been absorbed. If only that could be achieved all the time…

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