There are few things more powerful than a mystery that begs to be solved and for me one had been lurking in my mind for a couple of years. It’s not the kind of mystery that reveals itself by traditional means. For me, it has been an internal mystery in the pantheon of my mind where gods, demons, machine elves, archetypes and ghosts all coexist as thought forms.
I’ve come full circle in my process of self-discovery and have accepted the possibility that there may be gods etc. in reality. This does not require for me to descend into the bonds of dogma, but to acknowledge that something divine can and does occur even in life today. Magic is real; miracles are real. The thing I am sure of is that a very real transformation for the better has taken place and continues to do so. There is an absolute correlation between my experiences with DMT and my rocket ride of rapid revelation. For the sake of brevity I’ll only account 3 moments that were integral.
The first was when I had finally ‘broke out of the waiting room’ of the initial stage of a DMT experience. The challenge as many know is the difficulty of getting enough in fast enough to get ‘all the way there’. So when I finally did, I met the most curious group of people; The Trickster, The Engineer and The Feminine Aspect. In common machine elf fashion they bombarded me with all kinds of whimsical and happy thoughts that utterly confounded. They themselves looked like whirling, constantly morphing balls of energy.
At the time I was most interested in the trickster who felt like the most kindred spirit to me directly, but SHE, HER, The Feminine Aspect, whatever she was in the background allowing the trickster to have his show off time. But out of all of them, she was to be the most influential and driving in the last 3 years of my life.
The second experience involved 5 dried grams of psychedelic mushrooms in the quiet gloom of my Queens apartment. As the mushrooms began to take hold, I felt the need to get as close to the earth as possible, but being in New York, going outside and laying face down on the pavement among the throngs of people wasn’t really an option so my hardwood floor was the best I could do. As I lay there I sank right through the floor out of my body down, down, down into the earth where the soil became invisible, as easy as passing through air. And there in the center of the dark was a giant rainbow snake, which I immediately recognized by feel as HER.
As I floated in this inexplicable aether she told me that I was supposed to go to the wilderness and she would meet me there. She then showed me a vision of being in the wilderness with a big scruffy beard, washing myself in a rushing body of water. She said, ‘come to the forest and let us take care of you. Everything will be ok. Little did I know how clear, accurate and powerful this vision would become as my final year in New York came to an end with a move to Los Angeles and a marriage that was unraveling.
I had never heard of a rainbow serpent, but was surprised and shocked to know that the Aborigines of Austrailia worship a great rainbow serpent as the creator of all things and a bringer of wisdom. In Gnostic cosmology, the serpent in the garden of Eden is the hero of the story who teaches mankind that the one they believe is the creator is actually an imposter who wishes to enslave them by forcing them to live in either fear or worship and feed off them by way of their emotions.
My studies continued at a feverish pace and these visions from the Tryptamine world haunted me with cryptic calls to the wilderness. I didn’t understand, but it was becoming clearer and clearer. In Joseph Campbell’s classic book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces he describes the Heroes Journey, a hermetic voyage that all the great spiritual leaders and heroes of mythology had taken. It was his assertion that this was an archaic call for us as individuals to take the heroes journey. Having coupled this concept with the nagging image of The Hermit of the Tarot, it seemed like a very real thing that was happening catalyzed by the psychedelic call of the divine feminine.
Through a series of events I found myself at the end of my marriage and desperate for work after 8 months of unemployment. I made my way to Northern California to work as a farm hand. Inexplicably I was alone in the wilderness living on a mountain and using the local creek to wash myself. I was taken care of when the rest of the world didn’t work. I was safe in the lonesome womb of nature with a big scruffy beard! With 40 days in the wilderness without running water, a toilet, real showers, or an abundance of food I returned to Los Angeles as a new man. One that was leaner, one that was tougher, one that had learned to sleep alone in the woods with a knife and a flashlight.
When I got back to my friends, Albert and Macy (names changed to protect the awesome) in LA, we decided it was high time to do LSD together. I had tried it before, but the batch was bunk and nothing happened. This time, I had returned with the good from a friend I visited in San Francisco who said it was some of the best stuff she ever had. So we headed to a private park in Pasadena as the Acid began to kick in. We settled in a big open field and enjoyed the sunshine and people watching. A woman in the distance pulled a baby from her baby carriage and folded the child into the grass as it lay helplessly. The trees waved like a thousand Chinese women doing Tai Chi. The ground bent and flexed beneath me like it was a giant, breathing memory foam mattress.
After we felt we had worn out our welcome we returned their home where I was staying and sat by the fire allowing a bit more of the crazy to come out as we tripped hard. Macy, who for the better part of the day teetered between discomfort from the trip and a bit of worry to total joy, laughter and wonder decided it was high time that I make my return to the world of DMT after a year and a half hiatus. The tone of the room grew grim as Albert and I had the sobering realization that we might have to take that big leap, the blast into lightspeed and machine elf mystery. The look on Albert’s face is something I’ll never forget, his eyes big as saucers gazed at the floor as if he had just gotten death sentence test results. Macy in an uncharacteristic fit of boldness asked me again if I really wanted to pass up going through it. I said yes and tried my best not to think about it until the time actually came. I went to the bathroom and watched the walls breathe in and out as I had a pee. I washed my hands on the swollen towel, the carcass of a cookie monster slain and walked to the couch where Macy and Albert had prepared the wax bong. They lit it and put the DMT in, I breathed in as long and deep as I could and held it.
As the LSD and DMT met they dissolved my body into a hundred-thousand electric bees and with the Snap, Crackle and Pop I was thrust into a giant domed structure the size of a sports stadium. And there in that vast expanse where I was alone the walls and ceiling shimmered with diamonds, rubies, bone, ivory, emeralds, sapphires and every other precious thing in blinding shades of white. Then she arrived in the corner of my mind’s eye, HER, SHE, The Divine Feminine. I yelled out in the physical, “it’s her! It’s her!”. She was the one from my first big trip, she was the serpent in the center of the earth who called me to the desert; it was HER!
She said to me as she tread across the roof of the dome, “Of course it’s me, dummy! I’m she who dances to keep the world full of splendor.” Her implications meant that without her dancing, all beauty in the universe would disappear and be lost forever. I was not allowed to see her, but could only see the imprint of her foot as it tread, like the wind leaves its imprint on dunes. As she tread across the dome, the roof rained all the fine jewels as they fell toward me like floating feathers, dripping pearls like milk. The vision waned and I returned to my LSD state, which was beginning to fade and told Albert and Macy about my experience.
She told me that she had called me to the wilderness in order to set my path in motion, that it was what I needed to hear at the time. She also said that this was just my rite of passage, that the real work was just beginning and I was finally ready to take a much bigger voyage.
I told David Metcalfe and Dr. Aaron Cheak about my experiences and was shocked to hear that my experience with the divine feminine was a dead ringer for visions of Tara:
She who has the Face of a hundred completely full moons Of Autumn, laid one upon another.
She who is shining intensely with the completely diffused light Of a multitude of thousands of stars.
She who fills Desire, Direction and Space
She who has the power to squash down the seven worlds with her Feet
And summon all without exception.
She to whom Indra, Agni, Brahma, Pavana
And the Various Great Gods make offerings
She who is Bliss, She who is Goodness, She who is Peace,
She who is the embodiment of the field of experience of Nirvana’s Peace.
Dr. Cheak informed me that visions of Tara involve jewels dripping from her feet. I was absolutely floored that I hadn’t just had some random hallucination, but had quite literally had an encounter with the divine feminine, the resplendent rainbow serpent,the Gnostic Sophia, it was HER!
Now it seems more clear to me that she’s right here helping and guiding with grace and beauty. Where she leads me, I do not know, but I will go with a new glow of love that emanates to all those around me. Compassion and a fervor for a life lived well. It was her all along. It was her.
To read a translation of the traditional hymn in Praise of Twenty-One Taras, Click Here!
