Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. I heard the words "resist nothing," as if spoken inside my chest. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. `Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the `I' and the `self' that `I' cannot live with." "Maybe," I thought, "only one of them is real.". "One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. The book opens with what readers of religious texts, the erowid archives and Huxley's The Doors of Perception will recognise as a classic mystical experience, epiphany or trip: In fact, that is what it is and that is what I'll do. It would be easy to dismiss this book as a fruit-salad of New Age and pseudo-buddhist clichés, mashed to a fine purée of nonsense and sold as a cure for what ails you in our age of secular alienation.
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