Just Die

Living the best life means resisting the temptation to stay here forever

Okay, yeah. I had another “experience” I want to tell you about. It did involve a medicine ceremony, and I don’t want you to get the impression that I do this kind of thing all the time or, worse, that it’s in any way required in order to live a fully aware, embodied, conscious, and awe-inspired existence.

All of our experiences are potential portals to new ways of thinking and feeling. For just one example, I put my hand on a tree the other day. I don’t know why, exactly, but I felt compelled to put my palm on its trunk and leave it there for a bit. And I swear, I could feel the essence, the intelligence of the forest of which it was a part. These kinds of awarenesses, the ones we sometimes get to feel as children before stress and logic and being “right” about things obscures the subtle nature of being from us. As a result, we end up in the flatlands of the probable instead of the infinite swirl of the possible. Disconnected from the vitality of the rest of this organism, and obsessed with how to maintain the boundaries between us and everything else instead of how to make them more porous. We come to think of that solidity and permanence of self-hood as the life we want to extend, when it’s actually the opposite.

Here’s how I learned that.

I got invited to a retreat—just a few days in the country. (Interesting that word, “country.” The countryside really just means “not city.” It’s just the real world. There was nothing to call “country” until we built cities to define it by contrast.) I heard there would be a facilitator offering people a short-acting medicine called Bufo, but I wasn’t planning on making it a part of my retreat. I had just come back from that shamanic experience in Costa Rica, and didn’t want to interrupt all that integration with yet another download.

But when I met the facilitator, I started to feel like I was in the right place at the right time to try something I’d only heard about from Terence McKenna. I’m not getting any younger, and how many opportunities am I going to have? Plus the people who had been invited were really loving and accepting. This was a gathering of hand-selected friends, not a commercial adventure in the woods. It was a safe place — meaning, a safe place to experience challenging things. Everyone knew how to make space, how to engage and not engage with people integrating things, how to co-metabolize and co-regulate. And the facilitator herself? It was like I knew her from a dozen past lives.

I admit, I was scared. Bufo is a form of toad venom that contains a molecule know as 5-MeO DMT—often called the Mount Everest of psychedelics. It lasts about only ten minutes. Instead of a psychedelic trip with hallucinations and insights and what-not, you get total ego death. All subjective experience and self-identity is just stripped away. Time and space vanish. It’s like having a hundred mushroom trips on the head of a pin.

And for a lot of people, it’s challenging. Even psychedelic legend Timothy Leary once told me DMT was too much of a roller coaster for him. Too much ego dissolution, all at once. It is believed that 5-MeO-DMT is a naturally occurring substance in the human body. Something that gets released at the time of death, and responsible for a lot of the “near death” experiences people have of heading toward a white light.

The people and setting were so nice, though, and the facilitator assured me that we all get whatever the “God molecule” determines we need. That was enough for me, so I went into the huge ceremony room with three other people, so we could do it one at a time—and support each other by bearing witness.

Because I was the least experienced (nice for a change) I went first. I read a prayer, or really an extended affirmation, that the facilitator held up for me. It was all about how I already have the thing I’m looking for, how I am already loved, and stuff like that. Then she held out a glass pipe, torched it, and I inhaled. I heard bird sounds (I later found out they were made by the facilitator). It sounded like a flock of birds I could follow through a portal in the sky and then…

I was bathed in white light. Warm. Like the sun, but more. Total love. Total bliss. I realized my even having the presence of mind to think about it meant it was over. I was past the peak. Beautiful.

But all I could think about after that was do I deserve a totally blissful experience like that? I have all sorts of problems to work on, right? So why or how do I get through this without some horror? Why do I get a pass?

I was happy and glowing the rest of the day, but I still had a nagging doubt. Maybe I didn’t do enough? Had I somehow avoided the work? Some sort of spiritual bypass had occurred, maybe? More experienced people told me that most people don’t even remember what happens on DMT. It’s outside time and space, and whatever needed to happen, happened. I’ll find out later, and maybe even remember pieces of it, as it integrates.

But there was an opportunity to do it again the next day, and I chose to go for it. I decided that the medicine simply introduced itself to me on the first day. It knew I was scared, and wanted to show me it was a benevolent molecule—a gentle spirit that meant only the best for me. So I would go back and really surrender this time, to whatever it had to say.

The next morning I met a wonderful young man, who told me he was going to be in my group and that he was so very honored to be there and share this experience with me. I was touched and humbled. A person who knows of me and my work? Such a reward. As if my efforts doing all this stuff, all this Team Human and writing and vulnerability was coming back to me in the form of this person who happened to be in this experience with me. How good to see the face of someone who appreciates me.

We went back into ceremony. I was more scared this time. I was inviting this medicine to do its worst with me. I read the prayer again, inhaled as much of the stuff as I could, followed the bird, and BAM. An even hotter, brighter, totalizing dissolution of everything. Pure love, molecular vibration, resonance, disappearance. Nirvana.

So again, I ask, and right in the moment this time: Really? Do I deserve this? Total bliss?

And the Bufo answered, not in words, but by offering me alternatives. I could enter a state of purging. I felt the potential of spending an hour throwing up, my gut ready to contract, but I passed on that. No need to go there.

Then I touched the ocean of tears. I could cry an infinity of compassion for the suffering. I touched it, tears welling up, but let that go.

I thought of my achievements. Have I done enough? I could worry about what I’ve done, how effective it has been, and re-dedicate to getting more done in this lifetime. Eh.

Or I could worry about my friends, my daughter. Does she have the tools she needs to make it through this world? To meet the challenges of her illness, find a sustainable career? Will she be okay? I could worry endlessly about that…

Or, you can just die. Bufo said that. You can just die.

And that’s the door I picked. Just die. I thought of that young man who spoke to me earlier, the one who was so honored to be there for this. It made me feel like I would not die alone. Married or partnered or not, I had reached people with my work, with this work. They would be there when I needed them.

Just die.

And in accepting that, it was as if I had passed through the Bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and accepted the light, without being tempted by one of the many false promises of completion. There was nothing to do but let go into death.

That’s the moment I opened my eyes and returned to breathing, waking consciousness. I inhaled my first breath like a baby emerging from the womb. This place of breathing. Where existence is an active process. It had been a couple minutes, maybe just seconds, when that timeless eternity had taken place. Accepting death meant coming into this world. This world of impermanence. This world—and I mean this in the most beautiful way—this world of death. This is where we come to die. From the timeless, egoless void of perpetual bliss, to this temporary, fragile, metabolizing existence of inevitable change and eventual disappearance.

That’s what we do here. That’s what makes this place so special. That’s how we know we are alive. Like the frog: everybody, everything croaks.

They were all crying when I returned to the group. I hadn’t said anything but they must have felt it. The universe as a cradle.

Sadly, tragically even, our civilization seems built to deny or resist this essential aspect of this existence. The pyramids of Egypt and capitalism alike were constructed in defiance of the dissolution. This is why we built a world based on accumulation and extraction. Climbing higher and trying to reach into the sky as ourselves, ego intact. Extracting the energy of this place and its creatures and people to somehow accrue enough mass to escape the inevitable. To recreate the ineffable infinity of the place we come from and the place we go to, but right here in the world of respiration, exchange, and metabolism.

This drives the tech bros’ fascination with life extension. Or that guy who injects himself with his son’s blood in the hope of living forever. Or growing clone slaves for replacement parts. As if the purpose of this place was to resist the intimacy of being metabolized. We look at aging itself as disgusting, instead of seeing the true delicate grace of the old woman on the park bench, or the wisdom she can articulate about learning to exhale.

To take one’s mind, one’s personality, exactly as it is, and somehow upload it to a server where the breath has no province, and life is frozen in place, resisting the metabolism and swirl of exchange where true living occurs. “Just die” is the one option they cannot bring themselves to see, much less accept. In an effort to transcend, they reject the bliss of voluntary dissolution, and the passively active state of resonance with every other living entity in this realm. Poor things.

As I see it, the object of the game here, if there is one, is the opposite. It’s what Spinoza, the 17th Century philosopher was getting at. In his masterpiece, Ethics, he argued that the very definition of a person’s power and vitality—their life—was “their capacity to affect and be affected by others.” The capacity to affect and be affected by others. Your ability to be not an isolated object simply maintaining its own coherence, but a dynamic interplay of energies continually interacting with the rest of nature and society. True power comes from ceasing the struggle to freeze time, and instead learning to flow with the universe’s infinite causal chain.

Yeah, Spinoza got ex-communicated from Judaism and his books were banned, but that’s another story. His dangerous belief was that we multiply our collective power to act by developing deep connections with other bodies and minds and learning to harmonize with them. And to do that requires us to accept the fleeting, shifting nature of corporeal existence.

He believed that human suffering arises when our natural will to survive is misdirected into trying to keep things exactly as they are. Like the tech bro uploading his current data profile and saving it the way we preserve the latest version of a Word document to a hard drive. When we commit to that permanence, we shield ourselves and reduce our capacity to feel or act. The real opportunity is to recognize that our time here is limited, which encourages us to fully expand our capacity to find the others and dance with them in this thing. That’s what gives us the unshakeable peace —what Spinoza called beatitude working from Latin, or what Buddha called nirvana—that transcends the fear of death. Just find the others, and be open to the change they create in you.

And we can do this both individually, and collectively. The problem with this whole pyramidal civilization we’re trying to prop up is that it doesn’t have the capacity to tolerate its own demise. It can’t content with its own temporary nature. Maybe we need more people who can model a graceful exit.

After that whole experience, I made sure to connect with the young man—the one who said he was so honored to be witnessing my experience? The one who made me feel like having written all these books and done all this work has created a community who will be there when it’s my time?

I wanted to thank him for having shown up for me like that, and I asked him, just to be sure, “do you know who I am?” And he said he had no idea. He just saw my face, felt my essence, and it put him in a state of appreciation for sharing this moment together. It had nothing to do with my books or achievements.

In other words, he really did know who I am.

Thanks for being in this swirl with me. I know it’s been a ride lately. I hope you’re as affected by me as I am by you.