The Self Destroyed
The Self Destroyed
Ashley Lande
On Psychedelic Ego Death and the Self-Sacrifice of Faith
I’d died so many times I’d lost the will to live. That was the whole idea, I guess: transcendence through obliteration, absorption into the ambiguous All. This Allness represented both the ravening sum and the white-out annihilation of all things—nirvana in Buddhism, moksha in Hinduism, any number of vague neologisms in the New Age and hippie literature I hungrily consumed.
I’d propelled myself through the sieve of “ego death” routinely, mostly through ingesting psychedelics but sometimes through the less punishing avenues of meditation and kundalini yoga. But the sieve mirrored the cartwheeling, pulsating geometric lattices that fractalized my field of vision while I tripped on LSD: instead of destroying my ego, the passages seemed to honeycomb it into a thousand different identities.
I was still me, I suppose, whatever that meant—someone with the repulsively pedestrian name of Ashley who, at 23, was working on squandering a journalism degree by quitting a promising newspaper job to wait tables and plug away at menial office temp jobs that asked little more of me than rapid typing ability and a soft-rock FM phone voice.
That was okay—that was just my earth trip, a necessary if bothersome stage of evolution soon to be shed in pursuit of higher spiritual climes. I was Buffy Sainte-Marie, the ’60s folk singer whom I imagined as my mentor and prophetess and whose face I seriously contemplated having tattooed on my arm. I was Theodore Kampenfeld, a character in the novel I was writing, a cult leader and proponent of psychedelic spelunking, which he termed “glutting the sensorium,” who hastened his charges to the omega flashpoint of being and nothingness through routine drug ingestion and the creation of bizarre, obsessive art. But I was also Joe Gideon.
“It’s showtime, folks!” Roy Scheider as hotshot choreographer Joe Gideon in the 1978 movie All That Jazz announces to his image in the mirror every morning, flipping his hands outward in a snappy theatrical flourish, practically chewing on a cigarette that fritters ash as he moves and only leaves his mouth when he gulps from a glass of bubbling Alka-Seltzer water or gobbles the yellow Dexedrine tablets that fuel his perfectionism, his workaholism, his death-anxiety, funneling all of it into a nervy restlessness that forsakes all else for success. I watched my VHS tape of All That Jazz nearly nightly, absorbing it into my being, folding its flitting images and collaged, besequined scenes into my LSD trips, scanning it for vital clues to the puzzle of the universe, a puzzle that seemed to stretch outward in ever-dividing rimes of complexity.
All That Jazz ends with actor Ben Vereen posing as a begrudging emcee to Gideon’s final hallucinogenic farewell, a flamboyant, chromatic “this is your life” musical number punctuated by the sterile beeps of a cardiac monitor. “Folks, what can I tell you about my next guest?” Vereen ruefully intones. “His personal success was matched by failure in his personal relationship bag—now, that’s where he really bombed!” Vereen declares gleefully in a sad simulacrum of a eulogy, delivered, in keeping with Gideon’s life, as a mercenary performance rather than a heartfelt address from a loved one. Gideon came to believe, Vereen says, that all of this, all of the speed-revved days that comprise his creatively prolific but relationally corrupt life, it was all, well, a well-known expletive for bovine waste. “He became numero uno game player,” Vereen elaborates, “to the point where he didn’t know where the games ended and the reality began. Like to this cat, the only reality . . . is death, man.”
The only reality is death, man. I felt this maxim to my bones, and it struck dread in my gut. My quest for eternal life through psychedelics had led me to a crossroads where somehow life had become synonymous with death. I hurtled toward the imagined omega point, which receded ever farther into the distance, a stroboscopic hologram flittering down a funhouse hallway— now here, now there, now gone. But keep going, they prodded. Angels, demons: the distinction dimmed in the flickering light of the nebulous promise of enlightenment or salvation or just any kind of culmination to this fraught road. The drugs didn’t work like they used to. What was death, what was life? Was there any difference at all? Did it even matter? I took the acid as a matter of habit, but the thrill of discovering something entirely new, the soaring promise of unknown vistas, of sputtering revelation, had flown. I began to long for an end, any end to all this interminable pointless living. Any end would do. Like to this cat, the only reality . . . is death, man.
*
What does it mean to die to the self? And what is the self? In my bric-a-brac philosophy of everything—informed by acid and Alan Watts and Ram Dass and a smattering of half-baked hippie sophisms—the self was the ego, the enemy to be annihilated at any cost. It was the trickster, the sneaky saboteur, the horror that Ram Dass once saw crashing back toward him as he was coming down from an acid trip spent luxuriating in blissful formless oblivion—a dark gathering wall of individuated identity and all the baggage that accompanies it: shame, disappointment, heartbreak, sorrows, joys, loves.
“After people die, other people are born, and they’re all you, only you can only experience them one at a time,” said Alan Watts, the charismatic philosopher who popularized a pastiche of Zen Buddhism, yogic philosophy, and pantheism that dovetailed perfectly with the psychedelic revolution of the ’60s. “All beings throughout all galaxies—when they come into being, that’s you coming into being! It’s all a continuous energy going on—and if I am my foot, I am the sun.”
I bought it all wholesale, hungrily consumed all the aphorisms masquerading as wisdom. It’d been several years since my All That Jazz days, and I’d cooled it on the weekly acid trips and recovered some semblance of normal functioning, though underlaid now with a gnawing uneasiness. One day after emerging from the blank vacuum of Vipassana meditation, a Buddhist meditation method in which one aspires to become an impartial observer of reality, divorcing from ego and even perception itself, a thought accompanied by a bizarre vision washed over me as cold dread, like Ram Dass’s tsunami: If we, collectively, are God, we are all alone.
I pictured a baby suspended in black, star-studded outer space, umbilical cord severed, absolutely untethered— no source of life, no source of love, no source at all. If we were God, we were it. There was no one else here. I shook my head as if to clear it: no, that can’t be right. Surely I was looking at it too simplistically, too dualistically. Nothing is either / or, it is always both / and, we would say in the New Age circles in which I moved.
But I felt as if I were seeing it clearly for the first time. And now, I wondered—if it’s always nothing and everything, if everything is always an indecipherable Zen koan, a riddle without an answer—how is there any ground to anything at all? How are we not tumbling through black space, neither backward nor forward, a wailing abandoned infant for whom being told he is God is no comfort at all? If I am God, I thought, then there is no God—at least no God worthy of worship, or adoration, and also no hope of redemption because I can’t even go one day without hating, without judging, without bickering and clinging to selfish desires; without clinging to my life as though its loss meant ruin and not infinite amorphous bliss, no matter how much I told myself otherwise.
*
The baby image burned all the more vividly as I’d given birth to my son, my first child, several months prior, and the thought of him being of interchangeable spiritual and material identity with my foot or the sun seemed impossible to reconcile with the reality of his precious sweet-smelling skin, his beguiling smile, his inimitable himness already so apparent at just six months of age. It didn’t add up, and I didn’t want it to. My philosophies, my map of the universe, my confidence that I was headed in the right direction toward plumbing the mysteries of existence—had been felled by a baby.
In her biography of Watts, Zen Effects, Monica Furlong writes of Watts’s accelerating alcohol abuse toward the end of his life despite repeated warnings from doctors about his enlarged liver. Watts would quit for brief spells, enduring the bouts of severe delirium tremens such brief periods of abstinence brought on, but inevitably returned to heavy drinking. Furlong recounts that Watts’s son, Mark, once asked him “Dad, don’t you want to live?” Watts replied “Yes, but it’s not worth holding on to.”
Could it be that life—which was so cheap and ultimately undifferentiated, life, which manifested in a billion different forms all synonymous with one another, forms that were only illusions and in fact impediments to experiencing oceanic, formless bliss—was not worth holding on to? Could it be that our experience as incarnate beings, an experience haunted by the sense that matter in fact mattered beyond just some smoke-and-mirrors enlightenment arcade game, pointed to something beyond some grand pantheistic alloy into which all the stuff of the universe inevitably folded?
I shifted uneasily on my pricey yoga mat and looked at my son, asleep in a bouncer with yellow butterflies on it, his chubby chin resting drowsily on his chest, his adorable lips pouted. Suddenly my soul balked at the ideas that had once seemed so numinous and readily apparent in the thrall of LSD or mushrooms or meditation. There had to be a better philosophy out there, one more aligned to the reality I now saw clearly and indisputably in front of me. My baby wasn’t a foot, and he wasn’t the sun. He was him. And I loved him desperately and didn’t want him to be absorbed into the All and spat back out as someone or something else. It sounded desperately ironic, but there had to be something more than the yawning erasure of the All. Something deeper, something that offered a brand of salvation that wasn’t simply annihilation. Something more human.
*
In Miracles, C. S. Lewis argues that pantheism is the original religion, and what the fallen human mind predictably reverts to in the absence of any higher revelation. Is it possible pantheism is also the best consolation prize a jaded, broken, arrogant heart can conceive? Ultimately, what seems the most expansive and spacious ideology available becomes suffocating. “It’s not worth holding on to,” Watts said. Pantheism and its many iterations, its many branches fruiting with slight deviations—animism, panpsychism (“What we fondly call ‘primitive’ errors do not pass away—they merely change their form,” Lewis writes)—shoot for the moon and end up unmoored in space, so vast they diffuse the possibility of meaningfully describing the human condition or offering a balm for its desperate situation. The spell they cast can only last so long before it collides with the sting of death or the intractability of suffering or the irrational wonder of Love, which would sacrifice everything.
When I first became a Christian, part of me still strained to syncretize my prior beliefs with this radical new framework of the God-man, Jesus Christ crucified and risen, which really wasn’t a framework at all but instead claimed to be the ground upon which all else bloomed, the very foundation and quiddity of reality itself. It couldn’t be done, and suddenly all the books I read that performed all manner of acrobatics to do so and thus establish a “perennial philosophy,” which enveloped and animated all faiths, seemed shallow and effete. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made,” John writes in chapter one of his gospel. It is an outrageously bold claim, one that f lirts with preposterous grandiosity, and one that can’t be merely appended to any other philosophy.
I still remember the moment when, lying in bed trying to fall asleep one thickly humid summer night in our un-air-conditioned house, the chilling truth fell upon me: the Trinity was not another lens through which to view and interpret reality, just one turn of the kaleidoscope. It was the ground of it all. In Jesus Christ, I had at last encountered the One who made a claim upon me. I had freedom to accept or reject him, yes, but he would not be just another guru or constellation of ideas that I could incorporate into my pantheon of gods and philosophies. “An ‘impersonal God’—well and good,” Lewis writes in Miracles. “A subjective God of beauty, truth, and goodness, inside our own heads– better still. A formless life force, surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband—that is quite another matter.”
It was quite another matter, indeed. And the dying of self I encountered in the Bible was quite another matter from the speed-hastened death of Joe Gideon, whose journey down a luminous passage toward a beatific organza-swathed Jessica Lange at the conclusion of his final musical number ends abruptly with the zip of a body bag around his blued corpse. It was also quite another matter from the boundary dissolution I underwent on psychedelics, sometimes a sigh into oblivion and others an assaultive battering into so-called ego death.
What if what Ram Dass saw (and feared) roaring back toward him—his guilt, his devastation, his heartbreak, his attachments (a pesky diversion in Buddhism), and relationships—was what made him human and not just an abstracted point of consciousness, flotsam on a faceless sea? What if ego death wasn’t death at all, not the real kind at least, not the kind that yielded true new life? What if the escape from the fearsome “ego wave” was not by deletion but by redemption, the redemption of a God who saved through the most implausible of avenues, incarnation? “He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with him,” writes Lewis. He dies for love.
Death in the New Testament, I saw as I read, always had a purpose, and that purpose was singular. The thought of dying for love, for servanthood in Christ, held a dangerous, wild, and alluring spaciousness that all the ego deaths in the world couldn’t rival. “The greatest gift you can give other people is to work on yourself,” Ram Dass preached. But I was tired of “working on myself,” of spinning myself to exhaustion on the hamster wheel of meditation and thought-monitoring and yoga asanas that sorely vexed my hamstrings and brought me no closer to truth or freedom.
I was baptized on a cold day in October. The frigid lake water lapped at my waist and flashed slate and deep blue in the sunlight muted by cloud cover. Warm hands took me beneath the waters, just for a moment, just for a breath. I could never have reasoned my way to this death, could never have corrected by my own feeble intelligence the “primitive errors” Lewis references, the delusions psychedelics had engendered. I had to surrender: to sigh, lean back, let loving hands take me under. I had to trust this was no wanton destruction of the self as I’d known it; a resurrection was promised, and he who promised is faithful.
Ashley Lande
Artist & Writer
Ashley has been published in Fathom Magazine & (in)courage. Find her work here: ashleylande.com
Photography by Alen Palander
