Between my Vipassana retreat and the summer of my 18th year, I was enrolled in community college since it seemed to be the thing to do. I got a job busing and waiting tables at a vegan restaurant in Hollywood and got laid off after 3 weeks for making too many mistakes and being disorganized. My dad found that hilarious. That summer of my 18th year I was camping in the desert with some friends in Ojai California. A couple friends and students I'd met through youtube had flown in from Sweden and Australia to visit for a week. We decided to try Amanita Muscaria the famous red capped and white dotted from Alice and Wonderland. Being an insanely bold and ignorant at the time I decided to consumed 28 grams, 7 times the recommended dose to facilitate lucid dreaming and astral travel while camping that night. Didn’t think it’d be a big deal, since it was legally clasffied in California as a non-hallucunogenic substance. I later discovered at very high doses it is extremely powerful and deadly. Ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson studied the mystical effects of the mushroom and identified it as the mysterious Vedic Soma and Andrijah Puharich called it the “The Key to the Door Eternity."
Before I ate the amanitas, I heard a whisper internally that said "ask it for death." So holding the amanitas in my palms I requested exactly that and said to the mushrooms "give me death." About an hour later I was pitching a tent and suddenly became truly awake for the first time in my life. Presence of awareness dawned. It was continuous and unwavering. The body became tired and I wondered how I could possibly fall asleep with such clear and continuous awareness. I laid there with this perfect awareness and the body proceeded to fall asleep. I felt the chemicals in the brain release, causing the whole body to become tranquilized. There was awareness of the body one moment then the next there was only void. No body, no world, no light, no objects, no thought. The capacity to experience thought was gone. Thought could not be formulated. Mental images could not arise. There was just individuated consciousness in what seemed to be it's original condition as a point in space in a vast and infinite void. The only perceptions that were experienced could be described as “feeling-tones.” There was a tone of fear and a knowingness of impending death. That was it.
I was a space in space experiencing the tone that in hindsight is translated into the words “If I don’t get out of here I’m going to die.” So with intention I, as a point in space, began moving forward out towards infinite voidness. I didn’t know what else to do so just started moving. Kept moving and moving and after some time way out there in the void appeared a tiny star. The feeling tone of the recognition and the possibility of life arose and probably the tone of eagerness. So now as space I'm moving closer and closer to the light. Gradually this spatial formless consciousness began rotating, initially slowly. As I drew closer to the light the rotation became faster and faster. Faster and faster. I noticed a pin-prick of pain arising. At first it was barely noticeable, but as the spinning increased in speed the pain grew and grew. After some time the pain was all consuming TORTURE ten-thousand times worse than any physical pain I’d ever known.
Consciousness was being incinerated, I was being burned alive as this spinning developed centrifugal speed deepened. I couldn’t bare it. I couldn’t take it anymore. From what seemed to be light years away I heard a scream. I wondered what it was. Suddenly, I found consciousness had re-emerged in the physical body. I found myself sitting upright in the tent in meditation posture screaming my head off like I was being hacked into pieces. I remember my friends wondering if they should take me to the hospital. Apparently I had been screaming at the top of my lungs for 40 minutes continuously, so they feared my vocal chords would burst. I’m sitting there screaming bloody murder and my friend Kevin is holding my face yelling “go towards the light Ryan! go to the light!”
In that moment I thought “ok I go all the way or I die, this is it! this is what Jesus and Buddha discovered!” I closed my eyes and plunged back into that awful centrifuge of light and horrifying pain. I forced my consciousness into the bright center of this hurricane of torture. Pushing, pressing with my life depending on it, I forced my consciousness into the star of light and into the pain as far and I could. It was like entering a blackhole and having the fabric of my being stretched, ripped, torn to shreds, then tossed into a meat grinder. At some point the pain became so deep pain that pain itself was transcended. That event-horizon of absolute torture was passed, the spinning inverted direction and infinite bliss began to arise. So much bliss. Bliss unlike anything I’d ever known. Every particle of consciousness exploded in bliss, explosions upon explosions of immaculate bliss. Then suddenly the spinning stopped. Individuated consciousness was above this groundless floor of light above the universe and the entirety of time and space. One moment I was there. This sense of Ryan was there. The next, like a gust of wind blowing out a candle flame, I was gone.
In a fraction of a second I disappeared and all there was was infinity. Clear Light. Not ten thousand miles of clear sky, but ten-thousand universes of oceans of ten billion suns. Nothing and everything. All that ever was, is and will be was that light. Everything is Light. No time, no worlds, no self, no suffering. The end and the beginning. Eternity. It may have only been a split second here, but there it was the meaning of the word forever. Somehow the name “Ryan” arose in eternity. Maybe a friend had said my name and the body consciousness was beginning to make contact. I still don’t know.
Individuated consciousness arose and re-materialized in the body. I started to feel the spinning again, could barely walk or stand. I hobbled out the tent, nearly pissed myself, vommitted and as I passed out, understood what happened. I realized where that pain had come from. The Clear Light, is so powerful so bright it overloaded the brain and body. That light was incinerating me. It was too powerful. Thus the saying “if enlightenment hit you all at once it would kill you.” Terrified and confused, I prayed I wouldn’t endure that again in sleep. The next morning I woke up same as I ever was, but now completely without doubt about the path, dharma and enlightenment. At the time I thought "even if that was not full enlightenment, it was the absolute pinnacle of anything and everything I’d encountered." This journey was worth dedicating my life to.